Wayne inaugurated strict discipline. Two soldiers were shot down for sleeping on their posts. Whiskey was forbidden in the camp and drunkenness severely punished. He insisted upon cleanliness and regularity of diet. He taught the use of the bayonet and the sword. He dined with his officers, and carefully planned every detail of his expedition with their full knowledge.
Wayne had Chief Cornplanter, ninety Choctaw and twenty-five Chicasaw Indians with him, whom he used to sow dissension among the hostile Indians.
The war lasted more than two years during which time there were periods of four and five months that he was without communication with the seat of government. The Government viewed this Indian war with alarm, and not without cause, as two previous defeats made the outcome doubtful.
While the hostile Indians were perfecting their combinations the Government sent commissioners to Fort Erie to sue for peace. The result was that the Indians gained the time they needed, then refused to treat at all, and the burden fell upon Wayne to see that the commissioners reached their homes with their scalps on their heads, for which they formally gave him thanks.
On October 13 he had marched to a point on the Miami River, eighty miles north of Cincinnati, where he found a camp which he fortified and called Greenville and remained there through the winter. From this camp he sent out scouts and spies to secure intelligence and scalps. He also sent a force to the field where St. Clair had been defeated to bury the bones of the dead and erect a stockade called Fort Recovery.
In May a lieutenant with a convoy gallantly charged and repulsed an assault. About seventeen hundred of the enemy made a desperate attempt June 13, to capture an escort under the walls of Fort Recovery and to carry the Fort by storm, keeping up a heavy fire and making repeated efforts for two days, but were finally repulsed. Twenty-one soldiers were killed and twenty-nine wounded.
A few days later, after receiving reinforcements of mounted men from Kentucky, General Wayne marched seventy miles in the heart of the Indian country, built Fort Defiance, and then within sight of a British fort on the Miami River made his preparations for the battle which was inevitable.
He had marched nearly four hundred miles through the country of an enemy, both watchful and vindictive; had cut a road through the woods the entire way, upon a route longer, more remote and more surrounded with dangers than that of Braddock; had overcome almost insuperable difficulties in securing supplies; had built three forts, and now had reached a position where the issue must be decided by arms.
On the morning of August 20, 1794, the army advanced five miles, with the Miami on the right, a brigade of mounted volunteers on the left, a light brigade in their rear, and a selected battalion of horsemen in the lead. They came to a place where a tornado had swept through the forest, and thrown down the trees, since called Fallen Timbers, and where the twisted trunks and uprooted trees lay in such profusion as to impede the movements of the cavalry.
Here the Indians, two thousand in number, encouraged by the proximity of the British fort, determined to make a stand. Hidden in the woods and the high grass, they opened fire upon the mounted men in front and succeeded in driving them back to the main army. The enemy were formed in three lines in supporting distance of each other, extending two miles at right angles to the river and were protected and covered by the woods.