Major Croghan blithely prepared to do anything else than retreat, while General Harrison stayed ten miles away to plan a battle against Tecumseh's Indians if they should happen to come in his direction. On the 1st of August, Croghan's scouts informed him that the woods swarmed with Indians and that British boats were pushing up the river. Procter was on the scene again, and no sooner had his four hundred regulars found a landing place than a curt demand for surrender came to Major Croghan. The British howitzers peppered the stockade as soon as the refusal was delivered, but they failed to shake the spirit of the dauntless hundred and sixty American defenders. On the following day, the 2d of August, Procter stupidly repeated his error of a direct assault upon sheltered riflemen, which had cost him heavily at the Raisin and at Fort Meigs. He ordered his redcoats to carry Fort Stephenson. Again and again they marched forward until all the officers had been shot down and a fifth of the force was dead or wounded. American valor and marksmanship had proved themselves in the face of heavy odds. At sunset the beaten British were flocking into their boats, and Procter was again on his way to Amherstburg. His excuse for the trouncing laid the blame on the Indians: The troops, after the artillery had been used for some hours, attacked two faces and, impossibilities being attempted, failed. The fort, from which the severest fire I ever saw was maintained during the attack, was well defended. The troops displayed the greatest bravery, the much greater part of whom reached the fort and made every effort to enter; but the Indians who had proposed the assault and, had it not been assented to, would have ever stigmatized the British character, scarcely came into fire before they ran out of its reach. A more than adequate sacrifice having been made to Indian opinion, I drew off the brave assailants. The sound of Croghan's guns was heard in General Harrison's camp at Seneca, ten miles up the river. Harrison had nothing to say but this: "The blood be upon his own head. I wash my hands of it." This was a misguided speech which the country received with marked disfavor while it acclaimed young Croghan as the sterling hero of the western campaign. He could be also a loyal as well as a successful subordinate, for he ably defended Harrison against the indignation which menaced his station as commander of the army. The new Secretary of War, John Armstrong, ironically referred to Procter and Harrison as being always in terror of each other, the one actually flying from his supposed pursuer after his fiasco at Fort Stephenson, the other waiting only for the arrival of Croghan at Seneca to begin a camp conflagration and flight to Upper Sandusky.