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· 65 · C H A P T E R S I X  The Arrest of Jacob Smith  W hile Jacob Smith was gone on his too-late mission to Mackinac Island, General William Hull launched his invasion of Canada on July 12, 1812. The Americans took possession of Sandwich, a small town that would become Windsor, Ontario. Two days later, some of Smith’s comrades in Captain Richard Smyth’s cavalry company were also sent across the Detroit River to Canada, where they aided other American troopers and a force of infantry under Colonel Duncan McArthur, the commander of the 1st Ohio Militia Regiment . They spent the next few days raiding the Canadian countryside. These volunteers seized stores of flour, arms, blankets, alcohol, salt, and other supplies, supposedly intended for the Canadian and British military, at points along the Thames River as far as modern-day Chatham, Ontario. Canadian citizens complained the American raiders carried off plenty of their private property, too. Some of this confiscated property was taken to Detroit and placed in Jacob Smith’s storehouse. The Americans spread copies of a bombastic proclamation promising that the Americans didn’t mean to conquer Canada, but that no mercy would be given to any white man found fighting alongside of the Indians, whom they so feared. · 66 · c h a p t e r s i x Again some of the Michigan volunteers demonstrated they weren’t exactly disciplined soldiers. Members of Capt. Richard Smyth’s cavalry company were rowdy and abusive when they were sent on a detail from Detroit to round up some deserters south of town. One officer of the Michigan Detached Militia, Capt. Hubert LaCroix, complained to Major Witherell that Smyth’s men “conducted [themselves ] with great impropriety” when they arrived at Brownstown by fighting and wrongly taking a couple of horses from an Indian and a local resident.1 But this militia misbehavior was strictly a sideshow. More important was the fact that General Hull prepared, planned, and held councils with his impatient officers—but did nothing. No U.S. attack was made on the British at Ft. Malden, which lay on the Canadian side of the Detroit River where it flows into Lake Erie. There were small skirmishes and more raids and seizures of British and Canadian supplies, but no decisive moves were made by Hull to take the fight to the British, even though the American forces greatly outnumbered the redcoats and their Indian allies. Then came the bad news about the U.S. garrison at Mackinac. On July 29, Hull wrote to the Secretary of War William Eustis that he’d learned from “two friendly Indians” that Ft. Michilimackinac had fallen to the British. These were likely men sent by The Wing, possibly the same Indians who had helped Jacob Smith escape and who had spirited away the Hendersons from Saginaw back to Detroit.2 The situation for Hull and the Americans in the Detroit area worsened. When a detachment of Ohio volunteers was sent from Detroit south to meet and escort a convoy of supplies, horses, cattle, and reinforcements coming up from Ohio on a bright summer’s day, warriors under Tecumseh ambushed Hull’s men, who broke and ran. This battle of Brownstown on August 5 left 17 Americans killed and at least 12 wounded. Two prisoners taken by the Indians were murdered in revenge for an Indian killed in the fighting. That same day, the Indians also attacked and killed most of a squad of riders escorting mail coming up to Detroit from Ohio near a place called Swan Creek.3 As a result of these defeats, Hull steadily lost what nerve he had. He pulled most of the American force back across the Detroit River, out of Canada. To try to get those U.S. supplies and reinforcements safely to Detroit from the Rapids of the Maumee (an area near present-day Toledo), he sent a force of 600 men, infantry and cavalry, to try again on August 8. Jacob Smith’s comrades, the Detroit militia cavalry of Captain Smyth, were part of this mission. At about four o’clock in the afternoon of the next day, the Americans, moving cautiously, reached the vicinity · 67 · The Arrest of Jacob Smith of a recently abandoned Indian village called Maguaga or Monguaga, just a few miles north of Brownstown. Some 400 British soldiers, positioned in a nearby ravine, and a large number of Indians under Tecumseh, hidden in adjacent woods...

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