In December, 1793, General Wayne arrived with his army at Greenville and sent forward a detachment to the spot of St. Clair’s Defeat. They arrived on Christmas Day and pitched their tents on the battleground. Before the men could make their beds in their tents that night, they had to gather the bones together and carry them out. The next day graves were dug and the bones remaining above ground were buried. Six hundred skulls were among them. The flesh was entirely off the bones, but in many cases the sinews yet held them together. After this melancholy duty was performed, a fortification was built and named Fort Recovery in commemoration of its being recovered from the Indians who had been in possession of the ground since 1791. On the completion of the fort, one company of artillerymen and one of riflemen were left there; the others returned to Greenville.
Henry Howe, HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS OF OHIO (Cincinnati: Published by the state of Ohio, 1908), Vol. II, pp. 223-32.
The terrible battle known as St. Clair’s Defeat was fought on the morning of November 4, 1791, in what is now the northwestern part of Darke County, Ohio, near the Indiana boundary. Early in the preceding spring General St. Clair had received orders to raise and organize an army, to march into the wilderness as far as the junction of the St. Mary’s and the St. Joseph rivers, and to establish a line of military posts from Fort Washington at Cincinnati to the present site of Fort Wayne. The forts were intended to keep the Indians in wholesome dread of the power of the whites and to prevent those fearful depredations which had already done so much to check the advancing tide of civilization. In the execution of these orders, St. Clair surmounted many serious obstacles. After building Forts Hamilton and Jefferson, he reached a branch of the Wabash and encamped there in supposed security on the evening of the third of November. His army numbered between two and three thousand men. Several hundred women and children, the families of the soldiers, traveled with the army.
St. Clair’s great and fatal mistake was in his fancied security. Instead of having a large number of experienced scouts to scour the wilderness far in advance of the main army and to warn him of danger, he marched blindly forward as if passing through friendly territory. The Indians proved themselves more circumspect, for their scouts and runners had not been idle and had brought their leaders intelligence of the whites. To check and punish what they regarded as an invasion of their territory, the Indians collected a great force and marched forward to battle with their enemies. Because of the American commander’s neglect, these dusky sons of the forest were enabled to concoct their plans without suspicion, to arrange their attack without detection, and to carry out their designs with the most terrible effect.