The effects of Harmar's campaign were soon apparent. In the closing months of 1790, the citizens of Ohio, Monongahela, Harrison, Randolph, Kanawha, Green-Briar, Montgomery, and Russel counties, in western Virginia, sent an appeal for immediate aid to the governor of that state, stating that their frontier on a line of nearly four hundred miles along the Ohio, was continually exposed to Indian attack; that the efforts of the government had hitherto been ineffectual; that the federal garrisons along the Ohio could afford them no protection; that they had every reason to believe that the late defeat of the army at the hands of the Indians, would lead to an increase of the savage invasions; that it was better for the government to support them where they were, no matter what the expense might be, than to compel them to quit the country after the expenditure of so much blood and treasure, when all were aware that a frontier must be supported somewhere. On the second of January, 1791, between "sunset and daylight-in," the Indians surprised the new settlements on the Muskingum, called the Big Bottom, forty miles above Marietta, killing eleven men, one woman, and two children. General Rufus Putnam, writing to President Washington, on the eighth of the same month, said that the little garrison at Fort Harmar, consisting of a little over twenty men, could afford no protection to the settlements. That the whole number of effective men in the Muskingum country would not exceed two hundred and eighty-seven, and that many of them were badly armed, and that unless the government speedily sent a body of troops for their protection, they were "a ruined people." Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, were all being sorely pressed by savage incursions.