but totally unfit for the
terrible responsibilities of such an expedition against such foes. The
troops were of wretched stuff. There were two small regiments of regular
infantry, the rest of the army being composed of six months' levies and
of militia ordered out for this particular campaign. The pay was
contemptible. Each private was given three dollars a month, from which
ninety cents was deducted, leaving a net payment of two dollars and ten
cents a month. [Footnote: American State Papers, IV., 118, Report of
Secy. of War, January 22, 1791.] Sergeants netted three dollars and
sixty cents; while the lieutenants received twenty-two, the captains
thirty, and the colonels sixty dollars. The mean parsimony of the nation
in paying such low wages to men about to be sent on duties at once very
arduous and very dangerous met its fit and natural reward. Men of good
bodily powers, and in the prime of life, and especially men able to do
the rough work of frontier farmers, could not be hired to fight Indians
in unknown forests for two dollars a month. Most of the recruits were
from the streets and prisons of the seaboard cities. They were hurried
into a campaign against peculiarly formidable foes before they had
acquired the rudiments of a soldier's training, and, of course, they
never even understood what woodcraft meant. [Footnote: Denny's Journal,
374.] The officers were men of courage, as in the end most of them
showed by dying bravely on the field of battle; but they were utterly
untrained themselves, and had no time in which to train their men. Under
such conditions it did not need keen vision to foretell disaster. Harmar
had learned a bitter lesson the preceding year; he knew well what
Indians could do, and what raw troops could not; and he insisted with
emphasis that the only possible outcome to St. Clair's expedition was
defeat.

The Troops Gather at Fort Washington.

As the raw troops straggled to Pittsburgh they were shipped down the
Ohio to Fort Washington; and St. Clair made the headquarters of his army
at a new fort some twenty-five miles northward, which he christened Fort
Hamilton. During September the army slowly assembled; two small
regiments of regulars, two of six months' levies, a number of Kentucky
militia, a few cavalry, and a couple of small batteries of light guns.
After wearisome delays, due mainly to the utter inefficiency of the
quartermaster and contractor, the start for the Indian towns was mad