Procter could hardly help seeing that he was doomed to give up the whole Lake Erie region.  But he lingered and was lost.  While Harrison was advancing with overwhelming numbers Procter was still trying to decide when and how to abandon Amherstburg.  Then, when he did go, he carried with him an inordinate amount of baggage; and he retired so slowly that Harrison caught and crushed him near Moravian Town, beside the Thames, on the 5th of October.  Harrison had three thousand exultant Americans in action; Procter had barely a thousand worn-out, dispirited men, more than half of them Indians under Tecumseh.  The redcoats, spread out in single rank at open order, were ridden down by Harrison’s cavalry, backed by the mass of his infantry.  The Indians on the inland flank stood longer and fought with great determination against five times their numbers till Tecumseh fell.  Then they broke and fled.  This was their last great fight and Tecumseh was their last great leader.

The scene now shifts once more to the Montreal frontier, which was being threatened by the converging forces of Hampton from the south and Wilkinson from the west.  Each had about seven thousand men; and their common objective was the island of Montreal.  Hampton crossed the line at Odelltown on September 20.  But he presently moved back again; and it was not till October 21 that he began his definite attack by advancing down the left bank of the Chateauguay, after opening communications with Wilkinson, who was still near Sackett’s Harbour.  Hampton naturally expected to brush aside all the opposition that could be made by the few hundred British between him and the St Lawrence.  But de Salaberry, the commander of the British advanced posts, determined to check him near La Fourche, where several little tributaries of the Chateauguay made a succession of good positions, if strengthened by abattis and held by trained defenders.

The British force was very small when Hampton began his slow advance; but ‘Red George’ Macdonell marched to help it just in time.  Macdonell was commanding a crack corps of French Canadians, all picked from the best ’Select Embodied Militia,’ and now, at the end of six months of extra service, as good as a battalion of regulars.  He had hurried to Kingston when Wilkinson had threatened it from Sackett’s Harbour.  Now he was urgently needed at Chateauguay.  ‘When can you start?’ asked Prevost, who was himself on the point of leaving Kingston for Chateauguay.  ’Directly the men have finished their dinners, sir!’ ‘Then follow me as quickly as you can!’ said Prevost as he stepped on board his vessel.  There were 210 miles to go.  A day was lost in collecting boats enough for this sudden emergency.  Another day was lost en route by a gale so terrific that even the French-Canadian voyageurs were unable to face it.  The rapids, where so many of Amherst’s men had been drowned in 1760, were at their very worst; and the final forty miles had to be made overland by marching all night through dense forest and along a particularly difficult trail.  Yet Macdonell got into touch with de Salaberry long before Prevost, to whom he had the satisfaction of reporting later in the day:  ‘All correct and present, sir; not one man missing!’