and half-armed rabble reached Fort Washington, and the mean log huts of Cincinnati.  Six hundred and thirty men had been killed and over two hundred and eighty wounded; less than five hundred, only about a third of the whole number engaged in the battle, remained unhurt.  But one or two were taken prisoners, for the Indians butchered everybody, wounded or unwounded, who fell into their hands.  There is no record of the torture of any of the captives, but there was one singular instance of cannibalism.  The savage Chippewas from the far-off north devoured one of the slain soldiers, probably in a spirit of ferocious bravado; the other tribes expressed horror at the deed. [Footnote:  Brickell’s Narrative.] The Indians were rich with the spoil.  They got horses, tents, guns, axes, powder, clothing, and blankets—­in short everything their hearts prized.  Their loss was comparatively slight; it may not have been one twentieth that of the whites.  They did not at the moment follow up their victory, each band going off with its own share of the booty.  But the triumph was so overwhelming, and the reward so great, that the war spirit received a great impetus in all the tribes.  The bands of warriors that marched against the frontier were more numerous, more formidable, and bolder than ever.

In the following January Wilkinson with a hundred and fifty mounted volunteers marched to the battle-field to bury the slain.  The weather was bitterly cold, snow lay deep on the ground, and some of the volunteers were frost bitten. [Footnote:  McBride’s “Pioneer Biography,” John Reily’s narrative.  This expedition, in which not a single hostile Indian was encountered, has been transmuted by Withers and one or two other border historians into a purely fictitious expedition of revenge in which hundreds of Indians were slain on the field of St. Clair’s disaster.]

    Kentucky Volunteers Visit the Battle-field and Bury the Dead.

Four miles from the scene of the battle, where the pursuit had ended, they began to find the bodies on the road, and close alongside, in the woods, whither some of the hunted creatures had turned at the last, to snatch one more moment of life.  Many had been dragged from under the snow and devoured by wolves.  The others lay where they had fallen, showing as mounds through the smooth white mantle that covered them.  On the battle-field itself the slain lay thick, scalped, and stripped of all their clothing which the conquerors deemed worth taking.  The bodies, blackened by frost and exposure, could not be identified; and they were buried in a shallow trench in the frozen ground.  The volunteers then marched home.

    News of the Disaster is Sent to Washington.

When the remnant of the defeated army reached the banks of the Ohio, St. Clair sent his aide, Denny, to carry the news to Philadelphia, at that time the national capital.  The river was swollen, there were incessant snowstorms, and ice formed heavily, so that it took twenty days of toil and cold before Denny reached Wheeling and got horses.  For ten days more he rode over the bad winter roads, reaching Philadelphia with the evil tidings on the evening of December 19th.  It was thus six weeks after the defeat of the army before the news was brought to the anxious Federal authorities.