Bouquet refused to listen to either threats or promises from the Indians, and declined to treat with them at all until they should deliver up their prisoners. Although not a single blow was struck the Indians were vanquished.
Bouquet continued his march down the valley of the Muskingum[Muskingum] until he reached a spot where some broad meadows offered a suitable place for encampment. Here he received a deputation of principal chiefs, listened to their offers of peace, and demanded the delivery of all the prisoners. Soon band after band of captives arrived, until more than three hundred were brought into the encampment.
The scenes which followed the restoration of these prisoners to their families and friends beggar all description; wives recovering their husbands, husbands their wives, parents regaining children whom they could scarcely recognize, brothers and sisters meeting after long separation and sometimes hardly able to converse in the same language.
The story is told of a woman whose daughter had been carried off nine years before. The mother recognized her child among the prisoners, but the girl, who had almost forgotten her mother tongue, showed no sign of recognition. The mother complained to Colonel Bouquet that the daughter she had so often sung to sleep on her knee had forgotten her. “Sing the song to her that you used to sing when she was a child,” said Colonel Bouquet. She did so, and with a passionate flood of tears the long lost daughter flung herself into her mother’s arms.
Everything being settled the army broke camp November 18, and arrived again at Fort Pitt on the 28th.
Early in January Colonel Bouquet returned to Philadelphia, receiving wherever he went every possible mark of gratitude and esteem from the people. The Assembly of Pennsylvania and the House of Burgesses of Virginia each unanimously voted him addresses of thanks, and on the arrival in England of the first account of this expedition the King promoted him to the rank of Brigadier General, to command the Southern District of North America.
Colonel Brodhead Wins Thanks of Congress
for Raid Started August 11, 1779
Raids on the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier in 1778 were made by the Indians of the Ohio country; those of 1779 by the Seneca and Munsee of the North, from the upper tributaries of the Susquehanna and Allegheny Rivers.