This awful battle was a fitting close for such a campaign. In almost every sense it was the greatest defeat suffered by white men on this continent at the hands of aborigines. St. Clair's army numbered on the eve of November 3 one thousand four hundred and eighty-six men and eighty-six officers. Of these, eight hundred and ninety men and sixteen officers were killed or wounded. The army poured back to Fort Jefferson and then on to Fort Washington. The path hewn northward became, like Braddock's Road, a route for the hordes of Indians toward the frontiers. Their victory, so bloody, so overwhelming, gave confidence. Perhaps never before nor afterward did any battlefield present a scene equal to that Wabash slaughter field. The dying were tortured and the dead frightfully mutilated. On the theory that the army sought to conquer the Indian land, sand was crushed into the eyes of the dead in cruel mockery. Several scores of women followed the army--though contemporary records are singularly silent on this point.[122] Many of them, it is sure, fell into the hands of the savages and the first white visitors to the battleground found great stakes driven through many corpses.[123] The two underlying causes for this terrible reverse of American arms were the long delay in getting the army on its feet, properly supplied; and the undisciplined condition of the troops. The immediate cause of the defeat was, without question, the failure of all the officers who knew of Captain Slough's discoveries on the night of November 3 to communicate them to General St. Clair. Colonel Oldham ordered Slough to St. Clair; he went only to General Butler who dismissed him without acceding to his spoken request to be allowed to take the news to the commander-in-chief. The words of the standard authority on St. Clair's defeat are perhaps severe, but no new information has come in half a century to give ground for altering them; Albach says: "The circumstances under which the omission occurred, would favor an inference that he [Butler] sacrificed the safety of the army to the gratification of his animosity against St. Clair. The evidence given before the committee of Congress is conclusive that he failed, at least to perform his whole duty in the premises."[124] Butler's side of the story could never be told; fatally wounded while heroically exhorting his men, the poor man was carried to his marquee under an oak, by his brother, Captain Edward Butler. Propped up on his mattress, a loaded revolver placed in each hand, the old veteran was left to his fate. As his friends left the tent by the rear, the Indians surged in at the front.[125]