These positions afforded considerable protection to the frontiers, and facilitated the opening of the ensuing campaign.
Seeing only the dark side of every measure adopted by the government, and not disinclined to militia expeditions made at the expense of the United States, the people of Kentucky loudly charged the President with a total disregard of their safety, pronounced the continental troops entirely useless, declared that the Indians were to be kept in awe alone by militia, and insisted that the power should be deposited with some person in their state, to call them out at his discretion, at the charge of the United States.
Meanwhile, some steps were taken by the governor of Upper Canada which were well calculated to increase suspicions respecting the dispositions of Great Britain.
It was believed by the President, not without cause,[24] that the cabinet of London was disposed to avail itself of the non-execution of that article of the treaty of peace, which stipulates for the payment of debts, to justify a permanent detention of the posts on the southern side of the great lakes, and to establish a new boundary line, whereby those lakes should be entirely comprehended in Upper Canada.

Early in the spring, a detachment from the garrison of Detroit repossessed and fortified a position near fifty miles south of that station, on the Miamis of the lakes, a river which empties into Lake Erie at its westernmost point.
[Footnote 24: See note No.IX.at the end of the volume.] This movement, the speech of Lord Dorchester, and other facts which strengthened the belief that the hostile Indians were at least countenanced by the English, were the subjects of a correspondence between the secretary of state and Mr.Hammond, in which crimination was answered by recrimination, in which a considerable degree of mutual irritation was displayed, and in which each supported his charges against the nation of the other, much better than he defended his own.

It did not, however, in any manner, affect the operations of the army.
The delays inseparable from the transportation of necessary supplies through an uninhabited country, infested by an active enemy peculiarly skilled in partisan war, unavoidably protracted the opening of the campaign until near midsummer.

Meanwhile, several sharp skirmishes took place, in one of which a few white men were stated to be mingled with the Indians.
On the 8th of August, General Wayne reached the confluence of the Au Glaize and the Miamis of the lakes, where he threw up some works of defence, and protection for magazines.

The richest and most extensive settlements of the western Indians lay about this place.
The mouth of the Au Glaize is distant about thirty miles from the post occupied by the British on the Miamis of the lakes, in the vicinity of which the whole strength of the enemy, amounting, according to intelligence on which General Wayne relied, to rather less than two thousand men, was collected.