The English were now masters of Michigan Territory, and the western forests were alive with Indians on the warpath. Fort Wayne was besieged, and Captain Zachary Taylor bravely defended Fort Harrison. General Harrison, appointed to the command of the Northwestern army, promptly relieved both posts, and the government ordered that ten thousand men should be raised to recover Detroit and invade Canada. General James Winchester, in command of the advance corps of Harrison's forces, imprudently engaged in conflict with a much more numerous body of British at Frenchtown, on the River Raisin. Nearly all his troops, numbering about eight hundred, were killed or captured, and some of the captives were massacred. General Winchester himself was taken prisoner. Soon afterward the British General Proctor issued a proclamation requiring the citizens of Michigan to take the oath of allegiance to the British crown, or leave the Territory. The American residents in Detroit, under the terms of the capitulation, remained undisturbed in their homes, but their hearts were continually wrung by the spectacle of cruelties practiced by Indian allies of the British upon American captives. Many families parted with all but necessary wearing apparel to redeem the sufferers, and private houses were turned into hospitals for their relief. Mr. Kinzie, of Chicago, who was now a paroled prisoner in Detroit, was foremost in this work of patriotism and humanity. The defeat at the River Raisin was a hard blow to General Harrison, especially as the troops to make up his army of ten thousand men were slow in arriving. He did not lose courage, however, and when General Proctor sent an imperious demand for the surrender of Fort Meigs, Harrison answered: "He will never have this post surrendered to him upon any terms. Should it fall into his hands, it will be in a manner calculated to do him more honor and to give him larger claims upon the gratitude of his government than any capitulation could possibly do." "There will be none of us left to kill" was the reply of Captain Crogan at Fort Stephenson, when Proctor's messenger menaced him with Indian vengeance, should he fail to surrender. Harrison, reinforced by General Clay Green, from Kentucky, compelled the besiegers to withdraw, and the heroic Crogan mowed down with one discharge of his single cannon more than fifty of the assailants who were advancing to carry his fort by storm. Hardly had the remainder fled when the Americans let down pails of water from the wall of the fort for the relief of their wounded enemies. The formation of an army for the invasion of Canada now went forward in earnest, while the retreat of the British shook the confidence of Tecumseh and his Indian followers in England's ability to protect them against the Americans.