The message of that war-club sped eastward. The blow at the New England colony was sure to attract unusual attention, and no doubt played an important part in deciding the great question of the hour. This was a question of war or peace. As in the year previous, so now in 1791 (as well as in later times) there were many who opposed Indian warfare from humanitarian principles. Suffice it to say these opponents of war did not live on the Muskingum or Licking Rivers! Yet peace, for all concerned, if it could be secured at an honorable price, was most desirable, and the United States faced the question fairly and with energy. As early as December, 1790, the famous Seneca chieftain Cornplanter, being in Philadelphia, was urged not only to present the exact feeling of the Government to the Six Nations in New York and on the Allegheny, but was asked to visit the hostile western nations as a peace messenger. The declaration of war by the savages at Big Bottom in no wise deterred the United States from this purpose of obtaining peace at the least price in blood and treasure. In March, 1791, Colonel Thomas Proctor was sent to the Senecas to urge the young men of that tribe not to take the war path, and then was ordered to go with Cornplanter to the Maumee River. The task was dangerous and laborious, but Proctor pushed his way through the forests of Pennsylvania and New York to the Senecas who kept so well the western door of the "Long House of the Iroquois." It was a fruitless mission. "The people at the setting sun are bad people," said an old warrior to the intrepid herald; "you must look when it is light in the morning until the setting sun, and you must reach your neck over the land, and take all the light you can, to show the danger." The Senecas were right and the further Proctor "reached his neck out" over the land the more plainly was this seen to be true. Gordon, the British commander at Niagara, forbade him taking ship for the Maumee; "the unfriendly denial," he wrote the Secretary of War, "puts a stop to the further attempting to go to the Miamies." Another item in his letter was of significance: Joseph Brant with forty warriors had gone westward to the confederated tribes on an unknown mission.