Lewis gathered an army of eleven hundred experienced borderers from the Watauga settlement and the Greenbriar Valley, and marched swiftly northward. But the enemy knew of his approach, and instead of joining Dunmore's army at the mouth of the Great Kanawha he met a barricaded Indian horde, equal in size to his own army, and the bloody and momentous battle of Point Pleasant was fought and won. Arriving at the Ohio, Lewis encamped on the point of land between the two rivers. Soon two hunters pursuing a deer encountered the Indian vanguard which was bearing down on the ill-placed army of whites. One hunter fell dead and the other returned with the alarming news. General Lewis, a pupil in that school on Braddock's Road, lit his pipe and ordered the assault. Two regiments advanced on the Indian line, which now ranged from river to river, completely cutting it off from retreat. Both colonels commanding were soon killed and their men began to fall back disconcerted. Reënforcements drove the redskins back to their entrenchments, and renewed confidence. But at last fighting became desperate. Among his Virginians, the brave Flemming, twice wounded, kept repeating his order, "Advance, outflank the enemy and get between them and the river." Among his desperate followers the calm voice of Cornstalk was heard all day long: "Be brave, be brave, be brave!" As in the battle of Bushy Run, where the hope of the West lay with Bouquet as it did now with Lewis, so at Point Pleasant no way of success was left, at the close of that October day, save in strategy. The white man did not learn to conquer the red until he learned to deal with him on his own terms of cunning and deceit. In desperation Lewis sent three companies up the Great Kanawha under cover of the bank to Crooked Creek. Ascending this stream with great caution, these heroes of the day rushed from its bed upon the enemy's flank, and the tide of the battle was turned. The Indians, though having suffered least, fell back across the Ohio to their villages to the northward. The proposed junction of the two white armies was achieved, but Lewis had already sufficiently awed the Shawanese, who came to Dunmore's Camp Charlotte in their valley, and gave their affirmation to the Fort Stanwix Treaty, which surrendered to the whites all the territory south of the Ohio and north of the Tennessee. In less than a year Boone went through the Gap alone to the "Falls of the Ohio" (Louisville), and returned in safety, more possessed than ever with the ambition to take his family to the El Dorado which he had discovered, and of which he spoke in the enthusiastic vein which has already been quoted. He had found the splendid lands of which Gist had guessed; he had found a straight path thither. All that was lacking was an impetus to turn a floodtide of Virginians and their neighbors into the new land.