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Many stories of the battle were told by those who escaped. Major Jacob Fowler, of Kentucky, an old hunter, who went with the army as surveyor, carried his trusty rifle, but he had run short of bullets, the morning of the fight, which began at daybreak. He was going for a ladle to melt more lead, when he met a Kentucky rifleman driven in by the savages, and begged some balls of him. The man had been shot through the wrist, and he told Fowler to help himself from his pouch. Fowler was pouring out a double handful, when the man said, “Stop; you had better count them.” Fowler could not help laughing, though it was hardly the time for gayety. “If we get through this scrape, my dear fellow,” said he, “I will return you twice as many.” But they never met again, and Fowler could only suppose that his cautious friend was soon tomahawked and scalped with the other wounded. Fowler took to a tree, and shot Indians till his gunlock got out of order. Then he picked up a rifle which had been thrown away, and which he found his bullets would fit, and renewed the fight. It was a very cold November morning, and his fingers became so stiff that he could not hold the bullets, which he had to keep in his mouth, and feed into his rifle from it. At one time he was behind a very small tree, and two Indians fired on him at such close range that he felt the smoke of their guns and gave himself up for dead. But both had missed him, and he got away from the battlefield unhurt.

Another Kentuckian, a young ranger named William Kennan, was one of the first riflemen driven back by the overwhelming force of Indians. He tried to hide in the tall grass, but found that his only hope was in his heels. The savages endeavored to cut him off, but he distanced all except one, who followed him only three yards away. Kennan expected him every moment his tomahawk at him, and he felt in his belt for his own. It had slipped from its place, and he found himself wholly unarmed, just as he came to a tree which the wind had blown down, and which spread before him a mass of roots and earth eight or nine feet high. He gathered all his strength, bounded into the air, and cleared it, while a yell of wonder rose from the baffled Indians behind him. A little later he came upon General Madison of Kentucky sitting on a log, so spent with the day’s work and loss of blood from a wound, that he could no longer walk, and waiting for the Indians to come up and kill him. Kennan ran back and caught a horse which he had seen grazing, put Madison on it, and walked by his side till they were out of danger. The friendship thus begun lasted through their lives.

This is one of the few softer lights in the picture whose darker features we must not fail to look upon. One of the grimmest of them was the war chief of the Missasagos, Little Turtle, who planned the surprise, against the advice of all the other chiefs, and who merits the fame of the awful day. To the Americans who saw him then, he was a sullen and gloomy giant, who fought with his men throughout the battle, arrayed in the conspicuous splendor of a great war, chief, with silver ornaments dangling from his nose and ears. Hardly less terrible than the figure of this magnificent butcher is that of the Chickasaw warrior who accompanied the American army, to glut the hate of his nation for the Northern tribesmen. When the fight began, he said he would not stand for the Shawnees to shoot him down like a wild pigeon, and he left the ranks and took to a fallen log, where he fired with unfailing aim. But he could not be kept from leaving it to scalp the other Indians as he shot them, and his own turn to be shot and scalped came at last.

The battle ground was covered with a thick slush from the new-fallen snow, and this made the retreat more exhausting. A poor mother, perhaps one of the soldiers’ or pioneers’ wives, staggered along with a baby in her arms till she fell with it. The ranger McDowell then carried it awhile for her. When he gave it back, she threw it away in the snow, to save her own life, and the Indians found it, and took it to Sandusky, where they brought it up as their own.

Two years after, when a detachment of Wayne’s army camped upon the scene of the carnage, they had to scrape away the heaps of bones and carry them out of their tents before they could make their beds, and they buried six hundred skulls on the field. Such is war, and we cannot look too closely on its hideous face, which is often so alluringly painted that we forget it is the face of a pitiless demon.