You will have the goodness to state the expedients you possess to enable us to replace, as far as possible, the heavy loss we have suffered in the _Detroit_." But another year was required to teach the American Government the lesson that a few small vessels roughly pegged together of planks sawn from the forest, with a few hundred seamen and guns, might be far more decisive than the random operations of fifty thousand troops.

This lesson, however, was at last learnt; and so, in the summer of 1813, General William Henry Harrison waited at Seneca on the Sandusky River until he received, on the 10th of September, the deathless despatch of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry: "We have met the enemy and they are ours." The navy had at last cleared the way for the army.
Expeditiously forty-five hundred infantry were embarked and set ashore only three miles from the coveted fort at Amherstburg.

A mounted regiment of a thousand Kentuckians, raised for frontier defense by Richard M.Johnson, moved along the road to Detroit.

Harrison was about to square accounts with Procter, who had no stomach for a stubborn defense.

Tecumseh, still loyal to the British cause, summoned thirty-five hundred of his warriors to the royal standard to stem this American invasion.