When the Indian line broke and the retreat began, the nature of the ground, crossed as it was by ravines and dotted with marshes, made any thing like vigorous and systematic pursuit impossible. Perhaps their consciousness that escape by flight was easy helped to induce the Indians to abandon the struggle when they did. However that may be, they fled, and Weatherford could not rally them. Seeing himself left alone, with no followers to maintain the struggle, he was forced to choose between flight and capture. Flight, however, was not now by any means easy. He was mounted upon a superb gray horse which carried him in his flight with the speed of the wind, but he was not long in discovering that Carson had closed the gap through which he had hoped to escape. His enemies were on every side of him but one, and on that side was the high bluff. The story of what he did, as it is commonly told, is a very marvellous one. A bluff about one hundred feet high at the Holy Ground is shown to travellers, who are told that Red Eagle, seeing no other way of escape, boldly dashed spurs into his horse and forced him to make the fearful leap to the river below! As the story is usually told in print it is somewhat less marvellous, but is still sufficiently so to serve the purposes of a popular legend. It is that a ravine passed through the upper part of the bluff, reducing its height to about fifty feet, and that Red Eagle made a leap on his horse from that height. This version of the story is so gravely told in books that are not romances, that the author of the present volume once cited it in print in justification of an incident in a work of fiction, believing at the time that the legend was well authenticated. In examining authorities more carefully, as he was bound to do before writing of the incident in a serious work of this kind, he finds that the leap was much less wonderful than has been represented. Mr. Pickett, in his History of Alabama, gives us the following account, which he assures us he had from Red Eagle's own lips: "Coursing with great rapidity along the banks of the Alabama, below the town, on a gray steed of unsurpassed strength and fleetness, which he had purchased a short time before the commencement of hostilities of Benjamin Baldwin, late of Macon County, [he] came at length to the termination of a kind of ravine, where there was a perpendicular bluff ten or fifteen feet above the surface of the river. Over this with a mighty bound the horse pitched with the gallant chief, and both went out of sight beneath the waves. Presently they rose again, the rider having hold of the mane with one hand and his rifle firmly grasped in the other. Regaining his saddle, the noble animal swam with him to the Autauga side." The battle over, Claiborne found his loss to be one man killed and six others wounded. Thirty Indians were found dead on the ground. The number of their wounded is not known. Claiborne destroyed the town, with every thing in it.