The infallible proof of a great general is his ability to turn his conquered foes into friends. This was Alexander’s, Caesar’s, Jackson’s, and Grant’s decoration. It was lacking in William the Conqueror, in Wellington, Sherman and Sheridan. From Nashville to Fayetteville is eighty miles along the old military road, now as prosperous a farming country as ever an army tramped across. At one o’clock, October 11, a courier dashed into camp from John Coffee, guarding the frontier at the Tennessee river, crying that the Creeks were coming. He started back in five minutes, saying that Jackson was coming instantly. Instantly was always the better part of his religion. He acted instantly at New Orleans, and it was all that saved him. And no general, by the record, who ever lived before or since, save perhaps Stonewall Jackson, would have done it. Incredulous as it seems, by eight o’clock that same night these 2,500 Tennesseeans, with their sick and wounded general, had marched, footing it, thirty-two miles to Huntsville. Thirty-two miles in less than seven hours! They crossed the river at Ditto’s Landing, and then began that remarkable war of the civilized against the barbarian, equaled only when Caesar marched into the woods of Germany and fought their great Teutonic hordes from daylight till death. And the Nervit were not braver than the Creeks under Weatherford, the Red Eagle. Canby was an Indian fighter, tried and resourceful. He fought through the Mexican War, on the plains with Albert Sidney Johnston, through the Civil War, capturing Mobile, and proved to be a hard-fighting and an iron soldier. But the Modocs butchered him.