“Behold,” he said, “my moccasins are worn with much travel. I come quickly from Yondotia (Detroit). I bring great news. The American chief and all his men have surrendered. He was a coward. When the red man shook his tomahawk he fell down and cried out. Over Yondotia now flies the flag of the white father who lives across the great water.” No one spoke. The news from Fort Dearborn had been stirring but this from Detroit was overwhelming, both in its immensity and in the consequences it portended. The Bondies, Alagwa, and even Metea himself had come, through many years’ experience, to look upon the Americans as foes who fought to the death and who, even when conquered, took bitter toll of those who slew them. That Captain Heald and his garrison had been massacred was terrifying but not altogether amazing, for he was outnumbered and isolated. But that an army larger than any that had ever before been mustered in the northwest should have surrendered tamely, without a blow, seemed incredible. If it were true--and none questioned it--it would mean the destruction of American prestige and the rallying of thousands of savages to the British standard. Metea voiced the situation. “The white men are women. They have talked much and have pretended to be great chiefs and the red man has believed them. But now he knows. They are women. At Yondotia they begged the redcoats to save them from the wrath of the red men. It was the red men who conquered and they will conquer again.” Metea spoke the truth, though it was left to a later day to recognize it. All the early disasters of the war to the American arms were due not to the prowess of the British nor of the Indians, but to the fear of massacre. Hull’s surrender was not to actual foes but to possible ones, not to the threat of civilized warfare but to that of torture and murder by foes that kept no faith with the vanquished and that spared neither men nor women nor babes at the breast. “Surrender! If I have to attack I will not be able to restrain the fury of the Indians,” was in substance the message that brought about Hicks’s capitulation at Mackinaw, Heald’s massacre at Fort Dearborn, and Hull’s shameful surrender at Detroit. Hull was old, his communications were broken, he was surrounded by savages in unknown numbers, and the threat of massacre terrified him. So he yielded.