For once, Little Turtle's warriors did not stand. They feared this mad general. The trained infantry Legionaries moved so fast that they outfooted the cavalry; and they alone drove the warriors helter-skelter back through the timber, to the very walls of the British fort.
There the mounted riflemen and the dragoons smote with their "long knives," or broad-swords—for the gates of the fort were not opened, and the walls proved only a death-trap.
The Battle of Fallen Timbers was over in about an hour. The Americans lost thirty-eight killed, one hundred and one wounded. The loss of the Miamis and their allies numbered several hundred. Nine Wyandot chiefs had been slain.
Their warriors were scattered, their villages and corn-fields were destroyed, the British had not helped them, United States forts occupied their best ground from the Ohio River right through north to Lake Erie, and the long war had ended.
The Miamis and eleven other nations signed a treaty of peace, at Greenville, in August of the next year, 1795.
"I am the last to sign," said Little Turtle, "and I think I will be the last to break it."
Ever after this, Little Turtle lived at peace with the Americans.
The United States built him a house on his birthplace at the Eel River twenty miles from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He tried to adopt civilization and bring his people to agriculture and prosperity.
He was opposed by jealous chiefs, who envied him his house and accused him of having been bought by the Americans. But he was wiser than they.
He had been the first of the great chiefs to frown upon the torture of captives; give him a good mark for that. Now he frowned upon liquor. With Captain William Wells, his friend, he appeared before the Kentucky legislature, and asked for a law against selling liquor to the Indians. In the winter of 1801-1802 he asked to be vaccinated, at Washington, and took some of the vaccine back with him, for his people.