ade futile by the machinations of their British advisers.
By the spring of 1794, Wayne had an army sufficiently trustworthy to
undertake a forward movement. His route lay down the Maumee River, at
the rapids of which Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe had built a fort and
stationed a small garrison, in anticipation of an American attack upon
Detroit, which was supposed to be Wayne's objective. At a place known as
Fallen Timber, a few miles south of the rapids, on August 18, Wayne
found the Indians ready to offer battle. They had chosen their ground
with considerable skill, but Wayne employed his cavalry and infantry so
effectively that he drove the redskins from cover and pursued them with
great slaughter almost to the walls of the British fort. The British
commander demanded an explanation. Wayne replied with a taunt which
amounted to a challenge and which was probably intended to be such; but
the British refused to be drawn into hostilities. Had Wayne attacked
and dispersed the British garrison, he would hardly stand condemned at
the bar of history, for by the Treaty of Paris not he, but the British
commander, was the intruder on foreign soil. Nevertheless, war at this
time would have made Jay's mission futile and might have sacrificed the
whole Mississippi Valley.

The Administration had hardly time to applaud Wayne's victory when it
was greatly perturbed by an insurrectionary movement in western
Pennsylvania. The sturdy Scotch-Irish people of the southwestern
counties beyond the mountains had always felt their aloofness from the
eastern counties. They were now still further disaffected because of the
federal tax on spirituous liquors. They shared the feeling of the
Continental Congress, which in 1774 had declared an excise "the horror
of all free states." Even before the incidence of the tax was fully
felt, protests were drafted at mass-meetings and federal collectors were
roughly treated. The tax fell with heavy weight upon the small farmer.
Whiskey was not merely his chief marketable commodity: it was also his
medium of exchange when money was scarce. A tax on his still seemed to
be an unfair discrimination. Such was the pitch of public feeling in the
year 1793 that farmers who complied with the law had their stills
wrecked by masked men, popularly known as "Whiskey Boys."

Early in July, 1794, the marshal of the district court of Philadelphia
attempted to serve writs against distillers in the western counties who
were c