[CRUIKSHANK] HARRISON AND PROCTER 165 
They were haggard and unshaven. Their clothing was tattered and 
dirty with many months’ wear. Numbers of them still wore the grimy 
linen hunting frocks and trousers they had on when they marched from 
Kentucky in mid-summer. Blankets were wrapped about their waists 
to protect them from the cold and kept in place by broad leather belts, 
in which were suspended huge knives and tomahawks. Their long, 
tangled locks were covered with shabby slouched hats. Some wore 
leather stocks with a metal badge representing an eagle picking out the 
eyes of a lion. The great majority seemed sullen and dejected; but 
some maintained an appearance of bravado and defiance, one of whom 
excited peals of laughter from his captors by exclaiming in a tone of 
amazement, “Well! You have taken the greatest set of gamecocks 
that ever came from Kentuck!?! 
There were no buildings at Amherstburg adequate for the accom- 
modation of so many prisoners, and on the night of the 23rd all but 
the officers were penned in a woodyard exposed to a chilling rain. 
If they were paroled and sent home by the route they had advanced, 
the poverty of his means of defence would at once be disclosed, and 
probably other troops upon the line of communication would be liber- 
ated to renew the attack. The Indians proposed that some of them 
should be offered in exchange for the Wyandots detained at Sandusky; 
but Procter deemed this scarcely expedient. Yet it was necessary to 
get rid of them immediately, as he could neither house them, feed them, 
nor furnish the necessary guards without great difficulty. He accord- 
ingly determined to march them overland to Niagara, to be there paroled 
or forwarded to Quebec. On January 25th they were marched to 
Sandwich, where the wounded and others declared unfit for the journey 
were detained and lodged in the Court-house in charge of the sheriff.” 
Procter’s first act on his return was to write to General Sheaffe 
in the most urgent terms to send him a reinforcement of at least one 
company of regulars to make good his loss in the action. This was 
done with such promptitude that the light company of the 41st met 
the prisoners at Oxford and arrived at Amherstburg on February 7. 
Meanwhile he had learned with much alarm that a number of the 
inhabitants of “that depot of treachery, Detroit,” had formed a plot 
to overpower the militia garrison and make themselves masters of the 
fort while he was engaged at the River Raisin. The rapidity of his 
movements had alone prevented the execution of this design and it 
became known to him soon after his return. A letter from Woodward 
to Monroe was intercepted, which decided Procter to remove him from 

! Atherton, 54; Richardson, 140; Darnell, 72. 
2 Wm. Hands to 

