Smyth was greatly disconcerted. But he held a boat review on his own side of the river, and sent over a summons to Bisshopp demanding the immediate surrender of Fort Erie 'to spare the effusion of blood.' Bisshopp rejected the summons. But there was no effusion of blood in consequence. Smyth planned, talked, and manoeuvred for two days more, and then tried to make his real effort on the 1st of December. By the time it was light enough for the British to observe him he had fifteen hundred men in boats, who all wanted to go back, and three thousand on shore, who all refused to go forward. He then held a council of war, which advised him to wait for a better chance. This closed the campaign with what, according to Porter, one of his own generals, was 'a scene of confusion difficult to describe: about four thousand men without order or restraint discharging their muskets in every direction.' Next day 'The Committee of Patriotic Citizens' undertook to rebuke Smyth. But he retorted, not without reason, that the affair at Queenston is a caution against relying on crowds who go to the banks of the Niagara to look at a battle as on a theatrical exhibition.' The other abortive attempt at invasion was made by the advance-guard of the commander-in-chief's own army. Dearborn had soon found out that his disorderly masses at Greenbush were quite unfit to take the field. But, four months after the declaration of war, a small detachment, thrown forward from his new headquarters at Plattsburg on Lake Champlain, did manage to reach St Regis, where the frontier first meets the St Lawrence, near the upper end of Lake St Francis, sixty miles south-west of Montreal. Here the Americans killed Lieutenant Rototte and a sergeant, and took the little post, which was held by a few voyageurs. Exactly a month later, on November 23, these Americans were themselves defeated and driven back again. Three days earlier than this a much stronger force of Americans had crossed the frontier at Odelltown, just north of which there was a British blockhouse beside the river La Colle, a muddy little western tributary of the Richelieu, forty-seven miles due south of Montreal. The Americans fired into each other in the dark, and afterwards retired before the British reinforcements. Dearborn then put his army into winter quarters at Plattsburg, thus ending his much-heralded campaign against Montreal before it had well begun.