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The right wing having assembled at Fort Drane, General Scott ordered General Clinch to put his troops in motion on March 25th and take position on the Ouithlacoochee; but a heavy rain prevented the movement until the morning of March 26th. General Clinch sent forward two flatboats drawn on wagons to await the arrival of the troops at the river.
The right wing having remained at Tampa Bay from April 5th to the 13th, General Scott issued orders to General Clinch to move toward Fort Drane, and, after relieving Major Cooper, to co-operate with Colonel Lindsay, who had left Fort Brooke about the same time, for the purpose of penetrating the cove in a different direction from that pursued by the right wing on its march to Tampa, and to penetrate the forks of the Ouithlacoochee.
Orders were issued for a forward movement at sunrise on December 29th. They arrived near the Ouithlacoochee on the 30th, and threw up breastworks around their encampment. On arriving at the river next morning it was found too deep to be forded. No Indians being in sight, one of the men swam the river and brought over a canoe.
The Ouithlacoochee was forded on the 19th, and that night a breastwork was thrown up on the ground which had been occupied by the ill-fated party of Major Dade. At daybreak of the 20th they resumed their march, and buried on their way the remains of Major Dade and Captain Frazier and eight other officers, and ninety-eight noncommissioned officers and privates.
Returning to General Duncan L. Clinch's advance on Ouithlacoochee, here he was attacked by Assiola and his followers after he had crossed the river; but the general succeeded in repelling the attack and driving the Indians.
At the time of General Scott's assignment to the command all the information tended to locating them on the waters of the Ouithlacoochee and the St. John's Rivers; and accordingly against this portion of the country the movement of the army was directed.
This wing to move from Fort Drane and be in position near Camp Izard, on the Ouithlacoochee River, between March 26th and 28th. Signal guns to be fired at 11 A.M. The left wing, composed of the South Carolina volunteers, under Colonel Abbott H. Brisbane; mounted volunteers, under Colonels Goodwyn and Butler amounting to about fourteen hundred men to be commanded by General Abram Eustis.
The body was found a few days afterward, and General Clinch immediately sent a demand for the surrender of the murderers, but they eluded capture by seeking refuge in the "Old red sticks" in the neighborhood of Ouithlacoochee. This murder, it was claimed, was in retaliation for the killing of an Indian in the previous June.
All of the troops except Thomas W. Lendrum's company of the Third Artillery, about forty strong, had been withdrawn on the 26th, to re-enforce General Clinch at Lang Syne plantation, with a view to his striking a blow at the families of the Indians supposed to be concealed in the swamps and hammocks of the Ouithlacoochee River, with the hope of drawing the Indian warriors out and bringing on a general engagement.
War having been declared in the name of the Florida Indians, a detachment of volunteers with some regulars, under General Duncan L. Clinch, moved to the Ouithlacoochee, the Indian encampment. Three days before the event which will be described as occurring at Ouithlacoochee, Major Francis Langhorne Dade, with a small command, had moved from Fort Brooke to relieve the post of Fort King.
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