"Your general laments that he has been compelled, even incidentally, to _hint_ at a retreat, when speaking to freemen and to soldiers. Never, until you forget all that is due to yourselves and your country, will you have any practical understanding of that word. Shall an enemy, wholly unacquainted with military evolutions, and who rely more for victory on their grim visages, and hideous yells, than upon their bravery or their weapons--shall such an enemy ever drive before them, the well-trained youths of our country, whose bosoms pant for glory, and a desire to avenge the wrongs they have received? Your general will not live to behold such a spectacle; rather would he rush into the thickest of the enemy, and submit himself to their scalping-knives; but he has no fear of such a result. He knows the valor of the men he commands, and how certainly that valor, regulated as it will be, will lead to victory." Cut off from supplies, locked up in the wilderness, through which swarmed thousands of savages eagerly watching his advance, with only six days' rations of meat and two of flour, he issued this bold and confident address, and then gave orders for the army to march. Arriving at Ten Islands, he erected Fort Strother, to serve as a depôt, and to cover his retreat. In a letter to Governor Blount, from this place, he says,-- "Indeed, sir, we have been wretchedly supplied,--scarcely two rations in succession have been regularly drawn, yet we are not despondent. While we can procure an ear of corn apiece, or anything that will answer as a substitute for it, we shall continue our exertions to accomplish the object for which we were sent."