General Floyd was no more successful. Jackson started from Fort Strother for Emuckfaw January 17; Floyd left Fort Mitchell, on the Chattahoochee, January 18, for Tuckaubatchee, only forty miles south of Emuckfaw.[356] Floyd’s army, like Jackson’s, was partly composed of militia and partly of Lower Creek warriors, in all about seventeen hundred men, including four hundred friendly Creeks. From the best information to be obtained at the time, the effective strength of the hostile Indians did not then exceed two thousand warriors,[357] scattered along the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers; while experience proved the difficulty of concentrating large bodies of Indians, even when supplies were furnished them. The British commissariat in Canada constantly issued from five to ten thousand rations for Indians and their families, but Proctor never brought more than fifteen hundred warriors into battle. The Creeks, as far as was known, never numbered a thousand warriors in any battle during the war. Floyd, with seventeen hundred men well armed, was able to face the whole Creek nation, and meant to move forward, fortifying military posts at each day’s march, until he should establish himself on the Tallapoosa in the centre of the Creek towns, and wait for a junction with Jackson. When Jackson was repulsed at Emuckfaw January 22, Floyd was about forty miles to the southward, expecting to draw the chief attack of the Indians. Having advanced forty-eight miles from the Chattahoochee he arrived at a point about seven or eight miles south of Tuckaubatchee, where he fortified, on Calibee Creek, a camp called Defiance. There, before daybreak on the morning of January 27, he was sharply attacked, as Harrison was attacked at Tippecanoe, and with the same result. The attack was repulsed, but Floyd lost twenty-two killed and one hundred and forty-seven wounded,--the largest number of casualties that had yet occurred in the Indian war. The Indians “left thirty-seven dead on the field; from the effusion of blood and the number of head-dresses and war-clubs found in various directions, their loss must have been considerable independent of their wounded.”[358] The battle of Calibee Creek, January 27, was in substance a defeat to Floyd. So decided were his militia in their determination to go home, that he abandoned all his fortified posts and fell back to the Chattahoochee, where he arrived February 1, four days after the battle.[359] Six months had then elapsed since the outbreak of hostilities at Burnt Corn; a year since the Little Warrior murders on the Ohio River, yet not a post had been permanently occupied within eighty miles of the fanatical centre at the fork of the Coosa and Tallapoosa.