as shot just by my side. The ball entered the small of
his back. I took hold of him, asked him if he was badly wounded? He
told me he was; but says he, 'I do not value my life if we do but get
the day.' I then ordered two men to carry him off. He desired me by
all means to keep up this flank. He seemed as unconcerned and calm as
tho' nothing had happened to him." Reed, on whose horse the colonel
was carried to the lines, wrote to his wife on the following day: "Our
loss is also considerable. The Virginia Major (Leitch) who went up
first with me was wounded with three shot in less than three minutes;
but our greatest loss was a brave officer from Connecticut, whose name
and spirit ought to be immortalized--one Colonel Knowlton. I assisted
him off, and when gasping in the agonies of death, all his inquiry was
if we had drove the enemy." Washington spoke of him in his letters and
orders as "a valuable and gallant officer," who would have been "an
honor to any country."

Meanwhile the Rangers and Virginians kept up their attack under their
captains, and Washington, finding that the entire party needed
support, sent forward three of the Maryland Independent companies,
under Major Price, and parts of Griffith's and Richardson's Maryland
Flying Camp.[201] At the same time, as Washington reports, some
detachments from the Eastern regiments who were nearest the place of
action, which included most of Nixon's and Sargent's brigades, Colonel
Douglas's Connecticut levies, and a few others, were ordered into the
field. Our total force engaged at this time, now about noon, was not
far from eighteen hundred strong, and very soon a considerable battle
was in progress. Besides Reed and other members of Washington's staff,
Generals Putnam, Greene, and George Clinton accompanied the
detachments, and encouraged the men by individual examples of
bravery.[202] The troops now "charged the enemy with great
intrepidity," and drove them from the crest of the heights back in a
south-westerly direction through a piece of woods to a buckwheat
field, about four hundred paces, as General Clinton describes it, from
the ridge, or just east of the present Bloomingdale Asylum, where the
Light Infantry, now reinforced by the Forty-second Highlanders,
finally made a stand. The distance the latter troops had advanced and
the sound of the firing had evidently warned Howe, at his headquarters
at Apthorpe's, that they needed immediate assistance, and he prompt