At best, the Creek outbreak would have been hopeless. Although the number of hostile Creek warriors was matter of conjecture, nothing showed that they could exceed four thousand. At Pensacola, Peter McQueen was said to have claimed forty-eight hundred “gun-men” on his side.[338] At such a moment he probably exaggerated his numbers. The Big Warrior, who led the peace party, estimated the hostile Creeks, early in August, as numbering at least twenty-five hundred warriors.[339] If the number of gun-men was four thousand, the number of guns in their possession could scarcely be more than one thousand. Not only had the Creeks few guns, and those in poor condition, but they had little powder or lead, and no means of repairing their weapons. Their guns commonly missed fire, and even after discharging them, the Creeks seldom reloaded, but resorted to the bow-and-arrows which they always carried. As warriors they felt their inferiority to the Shawanese and Indians of the Lakes, while their position was more desperate, for the Choctaws and Cherokees behind them refused to join in their war. Four thousand warriors who had never seen a serious war even with their Indian neighbors, and armed for the most part with clubs, or bows-and-arrows, were not able to resist long the impact of three or four armies, each nearly equal to their whole force, coming from every quarter of the compass. On the other hand, the military difficulties of conquering the Creeks were not trifling. The same obstacles that stopped Harrison in Ohio, stopped Pinckney in Georgia. Pinckney, like Harrison, could set in motion three columns of troops on three converging lines, but he could not feed them or make roads for them. The focus of Indian fanaticism was the Hickory Ground at the fork of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, about one hundred and fifty miles distant from the nearest point that would furnish supplies for an American army coming from Georgia, Tennessee, or Mobile. Pinckney’s natural line of attack was through Georgia to the Lower Creek towns and the American forts on the Chattahoochee, whence he could move along a good road about eighty miles to the Upper Creek towns, near the Hickory Ground. The next convenient line was from Mobile up the Alabama River about one hundred and fifty miles to the same point. The least convenient was the pathless, mountainous, and barren region of Upper Alabama and Georgia, through which an army from Tennessee must toil for at least a hundred miles in order to reach an enemy.