An indeterminate amount of powder shipped from Philadelphia was practically ruined before it reached Fort Washington; one boatload was entirely submerged on the way from Fort Pitt. The officers attempted to keep this from the men but the news leaked out. “The powder was very bad,” records Ensign Pope of the militia, “I fired at a tree several times and hit but seldom; it would not force the ball.” Such of the powder as was good stood little chance of remaining so in the wretched tents that were palmed off on the quartermaster-general. Colonel Mentgetz, inspector, is our authority for the fact that, with the exception of two companies, the tents would not keep out rain at either front or back. General Harmar said the flanks of the tents were of Russian sheeting and the ends were of crocus or osnaburg and would not, in his opinion, keep out rain. According to Major Zeigler the tents were infamous and “many hundred dozen of cartridges were destroyed, and the troops, not being kept dry were sick in great numbers.”[95] The packsaddles were too big—“big enough for elephants,” said an officer; the axes sent from Philadelphia were useless—“would bend up like a dumpling,” according to Major Zeigler. In fact Fort Washington was transformed into a manufacturing city, and there was almost no kind of work that was not done—though often the necessary tools had first to be made. Two traveling forges had been sent west of which only the anvils were missing!
It is not to be wondered that St. Clair, as General Harmar afterward said, was often the first up in the morning and went the rounds of the shops and laboratories greatly disturbed over the vast amount of work to be done, the difficulty in the doing of it, and the ominous delay. For, with the heat of the summer’s end, the grass was fast withering, which meant that feed for the horses must be transported—an item of great magnitude.
The failure of the quartermaster-general to come forward, even when ordered to do so, compelled St. Clair to bear the brunt of all the results of mismanagement and delay. As noted, the delay of the quartermaster was never explained. His very appointment occasioned an outcry among officers who had known him; the soldiers laughed many of his measures to scorn. One of his employees who arrived at Fort Washington in charge of horses had, seemingly, no knowledge whatever of frontier life. The horses were not provided with hopples or bells; released from their long confinement in the barges they broke for the woods and many were never again secured. St. Clair facetiously hinted that their master would have had to wear a bell, had he gone to seek them, in order to be secure from becoming lost. It was found later that the horses had been fed, not from troughs, as ordered, but from the sandy river beach, where their grain was strewn and much wasted, the horses also injuring each other in an attempt to eat it.
But patience is exhausted before one half of the miserable story is told. More than enough has been suggested to show the condition of the “grand army” that had gathered and was now about to march northward. It is almost needless to add that an eternal jealousy between militia and regulars existed; that the troops were wretchedly clad; that nothing was known of the country through which the march was to be made, and less than nothing of the foe that was to be met and conquered. The camp of the army (except artificers) was moved by St, Clair on August 7 six miles northward from Fort Washington to Ludlow’s Station,[96] where the pasturage was better and where the troops were not under the influence of the dramshops at the little settlement about the fort.
On the arrival of General Butler and Quartermaster Hodgdon, September 7, a slight delay occurred through Butler’s being appointed president of a court-martial which General Harmar had demanded and by which he was honorably acquitted. It was September 17 before the advance was begun from Ludlow’s Station northward.
When the army, twenty-three hundred strong, at last filed out from Ludlow’s Station, the plan seems to have been to build two forts between Fort Washington and the proposed fort on the Maumee, the first at the ford, twenty-three miles north, on the Great Miami, and the second about the same distance in advance and twice as far from the Maumee.[97]
The army marched from Ludlow’s Station under the command of General Butler and reached the Miami September 17. St. Clair returned to Fort Washington to hurry up the contractor’s agents and muster in the militia he had called from Kentucky. From September 17 to October 4 the army was busy building a fort at “Camp Miami,” which St. Clair named Fort Hamilton.[98]
On October 3 Butler made the last preparations for the march, Fort Hamilton being nearly completed. All the artillery cartridges (except sixty rounds) were distributed, and one half of the stock of musket cartridges. A body of contractor’s stores was thrown across the Miami, under cover, to join the army on its march.
Concerning the route and the road, little was known. At the outset of the campaign St. Clair in his instructions was ordered “to appoint some skillful person to make actual surveys of your march, to be corrected, if the case will admit of it, by proper astronomical observations, and of all posts you may occupy.”[99] The first settlers in the Miami purchase[100] had spread inland a few miles at this time; one settlement, Ludlow’s Station, was made five miles up Mill Creek and another twelve miles up the Great Miami. Butler’s route from Ludlow’s Station to the site of Fort Hamilton was undoubtedly already an open trail that far. The day before he advanced from Fort Hamilton, Butler wrote St. Clair: “I have just received a verbal report from Captain Ginnon, the surveyor, who is returned. He has been seven miles, and says the face of the country is level but very brushy, and in his opinion it is impracticable for loaded horses to get on without a road.[101] Of this I will be a better judge as I advance and try the present order of march, &c. Should I find it impracticable to execute, I feel confident that any directions that may be necessary to facilitate the movements will meet your approval. The road is cut one and a-half miles to a good stream of water and ground to encamp on. Five miles advanced of that is a large creek, which is three feet deep at the place he crossed, but a little below is a ford, ...”
On the fourth of October, with enough provisions to last a few days, without its commander, who was at Fort Washington hurrying on three hundred militia, the army under Butler crossed the Miami River and entered the shadows of the Indian land. We have no definite record of the first days’ marches. It would not seem that more than five miles a day were accomplished. The route was in alignment with the Eaton Road between Hamilton and Eaton, Preble County. Four Mile (from Hamilton) Creek—then known as Joseph’s Creek—was crossed near the old “Fearnot Mill,” and the first encampment was made near what was afterward known as Scott’s tanyard on Seven Mile Creek—then called St. Clair’s Creek.[102] The line of march was up Seven Mile Creek, west of Eaton, where the creek was forded. “The trace cannot now be definitely located,” wrote a Preble County annalist, a generation ago. “It was not cut to as great width as most of the military roads, and the line has been almost wholly obscured by the growth of the forest and the action of the weather upon the soil.”[103]