The State of Georgia was most interested in the Creek war, and was chiefly to profit by it. Georgia in 1813 had a white population of about one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and a militia probably numbering thirty thousand. Military District No. 6, embracing the two Carolinas and Georgia, was supposed to contain two thousand regular troops, and was commanded by Major-General Pinckney. Under Pinckney’s command, a thousand regulars and three thousand militia, advancing from Georgia by a good road eighty miles into the Indian country, should have been able to end the Creek war within six months from the massacre at Fort Mims; but for some reason the attempts on that side were not so successful as they should have been, and were neither rapid nor vigorous. Tennessee took the lead. In respect of white population, the State of Tennessee was more than double the size of Georgia; but it possessed a greater advantage in Andrew Jackson, whose extreme energy was equivalent to the addition of an army. When news of the Mims massacre reached Nashville about the middle of September, Jackson was confined to his bed by a pistol-shot, which had broken his arm and nearly cost his life ten days before in a street brawl with Thomas H. Benton. From his bed he issued an order calling back into service his two thousand volunteers of 1812; and as early as October 12, little more than a month after the affair at Fort Mims, he and his army of twenty-five hundred men were already camped on the Tennessee River south of Huntsville in Alabama. There was his necessary base of operations, but one hundred and sixty miles of wilderness lay between him and the Hickory Ground. On the Tennessee River Jackson’s position bore some resemblance to that of Harrison on the Maumee a year before. Energy could not save him from failure. Indeed, the greater his energy the more serious were his difficulties. He depended on supplies from east Tennessee descending the river; but the river was low, and the supplies could not be moved. He had taken no measures to procure supplies from Nashville. Without food and forage he could not safely advance, or even remain where he was. Under such conditions, twenty-five hundred men with half as many horses could not be kept together. Harrison under the same difficulties held back his main force near its magazines till it disbanded, without approaching within a hundred miles of its object. Jackson suffered nearly the same fate. He sent away his mounted men under General Coffee to forage on the banks of the Black Warrior River, fifty miles to the southwest, where no Creeks were to be feared. He forced his infantry forward through rough country some twenty miles, to a point where the river made its most southern bend, and there, in the mountainous defile, he established, October 23, a camp which he called Deposit, where his supplies were to be brought when the river should permit.