Narrow as the road here was, it was cut wider than St. Clair intended. After the first day or two General Butler, as he suggested in his letter of October 3, decided that St. Clair’s tri-track plan of march was impracticable, and gave orders that but one road should be cut, and that the army march in a body.
On the seventh St. Clair came hurrying on from Fort Washington to join his army. The militia had gone on on the fifth, but in bad temper. Several deserted even upon arriving at Fort Washington. A sergeant and twenty-five men deserted on the night of the third. A score of men deserted from Fort Hamilton the night before the army marched. The anxiety of the officers, and the herculean efforts to get the army into fighting trim, had not created a very loyal spirit in the men who marched. A little more chicanery and misjudgment and the entire army would have mutinied. St. Clair, before mounting his horse, wrote Knox that his troops amounted in all to twenty-three hundred. “I trust I shall find them sufficient,” he added. The words remind one of Braddock’s last letter to the British Ministry before leaving Fort Cumberland for the death-trap on the Monongahela in 1755. Major Ebenezer Denny traveled with St. Clair as aide-de-camp and has left us the official account of the army’s march. Denny was not anxious to serve. “You must go,” General Harmar declared, “some will escape and you may be among the number.”[104]
St. Clair and Denny reached Fort Hamilton on the seventh, and on the day following pushed on after the army over the narrow course it had made; this was running “north sixteen degrees.” Four encampments were passed and the militia, and St. Clair reached his army that evening. There was full need of him. The army was making but five miles a day; and at that disastrously slow pace the stores were not keeping up. Tonight (the eighth) St. Clair wrote a stinging letter to Israel Ludlow. Instead of having ninety thousand rations, as was promised, St. Clair had to write “by day after tomorrow I shall not have an ounce unless some arrives.... If you found the transportation impracticable, you ought to have informed me, that I might have taken means to have got supplies forward, or not have committed my army to the wilderness.... No disappointment should have happened which was in the power of money to prevent; and money could certainly have prevented any here.... Want of drivers will be no excuse to a starving army and a disappointed people.”[105]
Another exceedingly unfortunate affair demanded St. Clair’s attention, in his opinion, that night. He had given carefully studied and explicit orders by which the army should march. As noted, General Butler changed the order of march as he threatened to do in his letter to St. Clair from Fort Hamilton. The reasons for the change did not appeal to the commander-in-chief; Butler was called to account for his action, apologized, and stated his reasons. St. Clair had ordered that the army march in three lines, contending that it was far more easy to cut three roads, ten feet in width each, than to cut one road of thirty or forty. St. Clair’s method was that pursued by the wisest and most successful generals—Forbes and Bouquet—in hewing the first roads across the Alleghenies. “The quantity of timber,” St. Clair records, “increases in a surprising proportion, as the width of the road is increased;”[106] the veteran conqueror of Fort Duquesne, General Forbes, wrote his right-hand man Colonel Bouquet under the same circumstances, urging the cutting of several paths, saying, “I don’t mean here to cut down any large trees, only to clear away the Brushwood and saplins....”[107] Temporarily, St. Clair allowed Butler’s alteration to stand, but insisted that it should soon be corrected as the army pushed on.
The result was that Butler conceived an intense dislike for St. Clair. The latter has placed it on record that, upon Butler’s arrival at Fort Washington, “he was soured and disgusted, and I suppose it was occasioned by the fault that had been found with the detention of the Troops up the river;”[108] Knox’s rebuke, previously quoted, would make plain the reason of any disinterest on the part of General Butler. St. Clair’s reproof here and now seemed to increase it; “from that moment,” St. Clair said, “his coolness and distance increased, and he seldom came near me. I was concerned at it, but as I had given no cause, I could apply no cure.”[109] As the half mutinous, because half fed, army blundered on, it might seem that lack of provisions was its most serious menace; yet it becomes pretty clear that the estrangement of Butler and St. Clair was even more serious.
On the ninth of October, the army pushed on nine miles, and the horses being tied up at night an eight o’clock start was achieved on the morning of the tenth, but only eight miles were traversed. At two o’clock on the afternoon of the eleventh the army drew out into the low prairie land which lies six miles south of Fort Jefferson, Darke County, Ohio, and halted for the night to search for a safe path through it. On the day after, a party led by General Butler found a “deep-beaten” Indian trail which skirted the lower levels “avoiding the wet land,” and this was followed for five and a half miles. There is no record that St. Clair followed an Indian trail until near the center of Darke County. The course heretofore had been run by the compass.[110]
From this night’s encampment St. Clair rode forward a short mile and chose the site for the next fort on the line from the Ohio River to the Maumee. The spot chosen was near the present site of Fort Jefferson, Ohio—latitude 50° 4´ 22´´ N. The work of erecting the new post was undertaken with alacrity by many of the soldiers and officers—the latter working in the mud with the men. Major Ferguson found the lack of axes a serious handicap, there being but one ax to three workmen.[111] Yet these discouragements were not as disheartening as the continual dearth of provisions. This undermined discipline, perseverance, loyalty, and honor. Desertions became more alarmingly frequent, but men who were not fed could not work and would not march. As half-rations, and those exceedingly poor, became the necessary order of the day, the army slowly melted from under the discouraged St. Clair. Every night found the army smaller and yet more discouraged.[112] In vain St. Clair beseeched Hodgdon to hurry on provisions.[113] But the contractor’s horses were lacking and those to be had were unfit for the heavy loads bound to them.
And here at Fort Jefferson another and more pitiful estrangement between St. Clair and Butler occurred. While the fort was being erected, the latter officer came to St. Clair’s tent and, in view of the slow advance of the army and the lateness of the season, asked St. Clair for a thousand picked men with permission to hurry on by a forced march to the Maumee and begin the erection of the fort there to be built. “I received the proposal,” records St. Clair, “with an astonishment that, I doubt not, was depicted in my countenance, and, in truth, had liked to have laughed in his face, which he probably discovered. I composed my features, however, as well as I could, told him, though it did not appear to me, at first view, as a feasible project, nevertheless, it deserved to be considered; that I would consider it attentively, and give him an answer in the morning, which I accordingly did, with great gravity: and from that moment, his distance and reserve increased still more sensibly.”[114] Butler seems to have considered himself treated with contempt in this instance. It cannot be supposed that such a brave veteran officer as Butler could have asked a thing which it was out of St. Clair’s power to grant; yet from the records of the condition of affairs it is difficult to see how St. Clair could have risked dividing his army which, for the whole week following, was on half-rations, and men deserting by twos and threes and even scores every night. Passing the question—which in no way can be decided—of the propriety of Butler’s plan, the circumstance seems to have deeply embittered a brave and good man with whom Fate had been dealing most unkindly since the very beginning of the present campaign. As will be seen, it were a kindness to Butler to believe that continued untoward fortune rendered him mentally incapable of acting henceforward in a sane manner toward General St. Clair.
Explorations were carried on throughout the twenty-third and the line of march on the Indian trail, previously discovered, was renewed on the twenty-fourth; the army stumbled helplessly on to Greenville Creek, where the city of Greenville, Ohio, now stands. This small effort to advance was more than the hungry army could endure and one whole dark week was spent here waiting for provisions. The condition of army discipline was probably indescribable. The Kentuckians, who formed the large portion of the militia, were not afraid of the savages but the lack of food completely demoralized them. On the last day of October a large party numbering at least sixty deserted, and, hastening down the roadway which the army had cut, threatened to seize the provision train that was supposed to be slowly nearing the sorry army. The threat cast a gloom over the army and St. Clair was compelled to order out the First Regiment, not so much in pursuit of the deserters,[115] as for the protection of the needed provisions. The army, weakened by the absence of this regiment, marched on—following an Indian trail that ran north from Greenville on the general alignment of the present Fort Recovery Road. St. Clair states the direction of the path as “north 25° west.”[116]
Added to St. Clair’s many discouragements and Butler’s disaffection, was physical ailment. The touch of gout experienced on the journey over the Alleghenies did not leave him. In his meager Journal he records on October 24: “So ill this day that I had much difficulty in keeping with the army.”[117] November dawned wet and cold but on the first his “friendly fit of gout” was growing better.