Sir George Prevost seemed to doubt whether Proctor’s excuse for the defeat lessened or increased the blame attached to it.[113] The defeat at Sandusky ruined Proctor in the esteem of his men. On the American side, Harrison’s conduct roused a storm of indignation. Through the whole day, August 2, he remained at Seneca with eight hundred men, listening to the cannonade at Fort Stephenson till late at night, when he received an express from Croghan to say that the enemy were embarking. The story ran, that as the distant sound of Croghan’s guns reached the camp at Seneca, Harrison exclaimed: “The blood be on his own head; I wash my hands of it.[114]” Whatever else might be true, his conduct betrayed an extravagant estimate of his enemy’s strength. The only British eye-witness who left an account of the expedition reckoned Proctor’s force, on its departure from Malden, at about four hundred troops, and “nearly a thousand Indians.”[115] The Indians dispersed until those with Proctor at Fort Stephenson probably numbered two or three hundred,[116] the rest having returned to Detroit and Malden. Harrison reported the British force as five thousand strong, on the authority of General Green Clay.[117] Whether the British force was large or small, Harrison’s arrangements to meet it did not please Secretary Armstrong. “It is worthy of notice,” he wrote long afterward,[118] “that of these two commanders, always the terror of each other, one [Proctor] was now actually flying from his supposed pursuer; while the other [Harrison] waited only the arrival of Croghan at Seneca to begin a camp-conflagration and flight to Upper Sandusky.” The well-won honors of the campaign fell to Major George Croghan, with whose name the whole country resounded. Whatever were the faults of the two generals, Major Croghan showed courage and intelligence, not only before and during the attack, but afterward in supporting Harrison against the outcry which for a time threatened to destroy the General’s authority. Immediately after the siege of Fort Stephenson every energy of the northwest turned toward a new offensive movement by water against Malden, and in the task of organizing the force required for that purpose, complaints of past failures were stifled. Secretary Armstrong did not forget them, but the moment was not suited for making a change in so important a command. Harrison organized, under Armstrong’s orders, a force of seven thousand men to cross the Lake in boats, under cover of a fleet.