In the name of that order and city, St. Clair went to war. But sickness laid him low, and he was carried to the field of battle wrapped in flannels. Managing the forces against him was Thayendanegea, the celebrated Mohawk, or Joseph Brandt, as the English called him, as astute as Tecumseh and as fearless. Thayendanegea had been secretary to Sir Guy Johnson. He had learned the tactics of civilized armies, and with masterful native cunning he planned to annihilate the forces of St. Clair. Nearly fifteen hundred officers and men marched away from Cincinnati to crush the semi-savage captain who had directed the massacres of Minisink and Wyoming, and back to Cincinnati in rout and dishonor, their guns and blankets abandoned, rushed in unspeakable terror a pitiful five hundred. Before sundown on the day of that battle, November 4, 1791, nearly a thousand scalps of white men dangled from the wigwams of the armies of Thayendanegea. Other communities along the Ohio looked with envy upon the federal ramparts at Cincinnati, but the protection afforded by the garrison was at first more fanciful than real. The pioneer clergymen of the town ventured to Sabbath services cautiously, rifle in hand, peering down the dim aisles hewn through dense woods of linden and birch that led to a clearing, in the midst of which some charred stump served as a pulpit; or, as congregations grew, a log-built chapel housed the earnest worshippers. And by the law of Cincinnati and the territory every communicant was required to go to the altar with loaded firearms, that savages, taking advantage of the hour of prayer to attack the town, might be repulsed. Even when pews were built to give regularity to worship, the brethren were commanded to sit at the outer end, with their rifles in readiness. If Fort Washington had not been built or had been located elsewhere, Cincinnati would have still become the metropolis of the Ohio. Here water highways crossed. And as it marked the path over which the red men had passed for ages, so now it became the intersecting point of civilized adventure. Out of the shadows of the Licking in their pirogues Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark had hurried across the Ohio to watch hostile campfires from the Cincinnati hills, and thence had descended upon the barbarians to avenge crimes committed in Kentucky. The long beaches at the Cincinnati site afforded safe landing, while the settlement, secure upon the higher ground and the succession of terraces beyond, could not be engulfed by the periodical river floods. North and south the rivers that mingled their waters here furnished natural pathways to vast and fertile valleys.