The first move of the invaders in the West was designed to recover Detroit and cut off Mackinaw.  Harrison, victorious over the Indians at Tippecanoe in 1811, was now expected to strike terror into them once more, both by his reputation and by the size of his forces.  In midwinter he had one wing of his army on the Sandusky, under his own command, and the other on the Maumee, under Winchester, a rather commonplace general.  At Frenchtown stood a little British post defended by fifty Canadians and a hundred Indians.  Winchester moved north to drive these men away from American soil.  But Procter crossed the Detroit from Amherstburg on the ice, and defeated Winchester’s thousand whites with his own five hundred whites and five hundred Indians at dawn on January 22, making Winchester a prisoner.  Procter was unable to control the Indians, who ran wild.  They hated the Westerners who made up Winchester’s force, as the men who had deprived them of their lands, and they now wreaked their vengeance on them for some time before they could be again brought within the bounds of civilized warfare.  After the battle Procter retired to Amherstburg; Harrison began to build Fort Meigs on the Maumee; and a pause of three months followed all over the western scene.

But winter warfare was also going on elsewhere.  A month after Procter’s success, Prevost, when passing through Prescott, on the upper St Lawrence, reluctantly gave Colonel Macdonell of Glengarry provisional leave to attack Ogdensburg, from which the Americans were forwarding supplies to Sackett’s Harbour, sending out raiding parties, and threatening the British line of communication to the west.  No sooner was Prevost clear of Prescott than Macdonell led his four hundred regulars and one hundred militia over the ice against the American fort.  His direct assault failed.  But when he had carried the village at the point of the bayonet the garrison ran.  Macdonell then destroyed the fort, the barracks, and four vessels.  He also took seventy prisoners, eleven guns, and a large supply of stores.

With the spring came new movements in the West.  On May 9 Procter broke camp and retired from an unsuccessful siege of Fort Meigs (now Toledo) at the south-western corner of Lake Erie.  He had started this siege a fortnight earlier with a thousand whites and a thousand Indians under Tecumseh; and at first had seemed likely to succeed.  But after the first encounter the Indians began to leave; while most of the militia had soon to be sent home to their farms to prevent the risk of starvation.  Thus Procter presently found himself with only five hundred effectives in face of a much superior and constantly increasing enemy.  In the summer he returned to the attack, this time against the American position on the lower Sandusky, nearly thirty miles east of Fort Meigs.  There, on August 2, he tried to take Fort Stephenson.  But his light guns could make no breach; and he lost a hundred men in the assault.