Weatherford had collected his men in the upper towns, and was now moving down the river, managing his advance very skilfully, after the manner of regularly educated military men. In small affairs the Indian general followed the tactics of his race, depending upon cunning and silent creeping for the concealment of his movements, but he was too able an officer to fall into the mistake of supposing that an army could be advanced in this way for a long distance in secret. He knew that his movements would be watched very closely and promptly reported. He therefore resorted to strategy--or rather to sound methods of grand tactics--as a means of concealing, not the fact that he was advancing, but the real direction and objective point of his advance. He moved southward, taking care to make demonstrations upon his flank which were calculated to deceive his enemy. He threatened the settlements in the peninsula, and constantly kept up a front of observation in a direction different from that in which his main body was actually moving. In this way he managed to advance to McGirth's plantation, on the Alabama River, in the neighborhood of the place where the town of Claiborne now stands, without revealing the purpose of his advance, and as this halting point was one at which his presence seemed to threaten an attack upon Fort Glass, Fort Sinquefield, and the other posts in what is now Clarke County, his real purpose was still effectually concealed. Meantime General Claiborne was not disposed to lie still and permit his wily adversary to determine the course of the campaign. We said in the beginning of this chapter that by a timely resort to offensive measures the settlers might have averted a general war. It was now General Claiborne's opinion that with the troops at command a policy of this kind offered even yet the best prospect of success. Even before he had finished his defensive preparations he planned an offensive campaign, which he was confident of his ability to execute, while he was equally confident that its execution would save a very much severer effort in future. On the 2d of August, 1813, he wrote to his commanding general, explaining the situation, and adding these words: "If you will authorize my entering the Creek nation, I will do so in ten days after the junction of the Seventh Regiment, and if I am not disappointed, will give to our frontiers peace, and to the government any portion of the Creek country they please. Some force ought to enter the nation before they systematize and are fully prepared for war. With one thousand men and your authority to march immediately, I pledge myself to burn any town in the Creek nation. Three months hence it might be difficult for three thousand to effect what can be done with a third of the number at present. They gain strength, and their munitions of war enlarge every day."