to meet the Delawares and Shawnees, who had promised to
bring in their prisoners. But none awaited him: the
Indians had deliberately deceived him and were playing
for time while they continued their attacks on the border
settlers. Here he received a letter from Gage ordering
him to disregard the treaty he had made with the Delawares
and to join Bouquet at Fort Pitt, an order which Bradstreet
did not obey, making the excuse that the low state of
the water in the rivers made impossible an advance to
Fort Pitt. On October 18 he left Sandusky for Niagara,
having accomplished nothing except occupation of the
forts. Having already blundered hopelessly in dealing
with the Indians, he was to blunder still further. On
his way down Lake Erie he encamped one night, when storm
threatened, on an exposed shore, and a gale from the
north-east broke upon his camp and destroyed half his
boats. Two hundred and eighty of his soldiers had to
march overland to Niagara. Many of them perished; others,
starved, exhausted, frost-bitten, came staggering in by
twos and threes till near the end of December. The
expedition was a fiasco. It blasted Bradstreet's reputation,
and made the British name for a time contemptible among
the Indians.

The other expedition from Fort Pitt has a different
history. All through the summer Bouquet had been recruiting
troops for the invasion of the Delaware country. The
soldiers were slow in arriving, and it was not until the
end of September that all was ready. Early in October
Bouquet marched out of Fort Pitt with one thousand