The Indians, who had hurried their women and children across the river, fought desperately for a short time, and then broke and fled, many of them swimming the river and escaping. About thirty were killed. The whites lost one killed and six wounded. Claiborne sacked and burned the village, and then returned to Fort Claiborne, where his forces rapidly melted away by the expiration of their terms of service. Jackson, at Fort Strother, was in a similar predicament; and thus closed the year on the campaign at the South. It had been attended with many instances of individual bravery and exciting and romantic adventure, one of the most famous of which is known as the Canoe Fight, of which General Samuel Dale was the hero. There can be no better account of it than Dale's own, as he related it some years afterward to his friend Hon. John H. F. Claiborne, who incorporated it in his "Life of Dale." The General was on his way, {189}November 13th, with sixty men, to attack an Indian camp on the east side of the Alabama, near what is now Dale's Ferry. He says: "I put thirty of my men on the east bank, where the path ran directly by the river-side. With twenty men I kept the western bank, and thus we proceeded to Randon's Landing. A dozen fires were burning, and numerous scaffolds for drying meat, denoting a large body of Indians; but none were visible. About half past ten A.M. we discerned a large canoe coming down stream. It contained eleven warriors. Observing that they were about to land at a cane-brake just above us, I called to my men to follow, and dashed for the-, cane-brake with all my might. Only seven of my men kept up with me. As the Indians were in the act of landing, we fired. Two leaped into the water. Jim Smith shot one as he rose, and I shot the other. In the mean time they had backed into deep water, and three Indians were swimming on the off side of the canoe, working her as far from the shore as they could, to get out of the range of our guns. The others lay in the bottom of the canoe, which was thirty odd feet long, four feet deep, and three feet beam, made of an immense cypress-tree, specially for the transportation of corn. One of the warriors shouted to Weathersford (who was in the {190}vicinity, as it afterward appeared, but invisible to us), 'Yos-ta-hah! yos-ta-hah!' 'They are spoiling us.' This fellow was in the water, his hands on the gunwale of the pirogue, and as often as he rose to shout we fired, but ineffectually. He suddenly showed himself breast-high, whooping in derision, and said, 'Why don't you shoot?' I drew my sight just between his hands, and as he rose I lodged a bullet in his brains. Their canoe then floated down with the current. I ordered my men on the east bank to fetch the boats. Six of them jumped into a canoe, and paddled to the Indians, when one of them cried out, 'Live Indians! Back water, boys! back water!' and the frightened fellows paddled back whence they came.