Among the three Indians and three "white savages" (white men who lived as Indians) captured was Emistisiguo's son. The next day, Pickens and Dooly led their men against Emistisiguo himself. Three Indians were reportedly killed at the head of the Ogeechee River. In the face of such opposition, most of Taitt's followers deserted; he had only seventy warriors still with him when he reached Savannah. The men of the Georgia militia paraded the scalps of their victims in Augusta although they released Emistisiguo's son as a peace gesture. Pickens and Williamson now had high praise for Dooly and specifically for the intelligence from his network of scouts.(n39) Such victories by the militia as these reversed the overall military situation. As a writer in a British publication noted about the war in general: "Most of these actions would in other wars be considered as skirmishes of little account, and scarcely worthy of a detailed narrative. But these small actions are as capable as any of displaying conduct. The operations of war being spread over the vast continent…it is by such skirmishes that the fate of America must be decided. They are therefore as important as battles in which a hundred thousand men are drawn up on each side."(n40) The British army had withdrawn from Augusta just hours before Boyd met defeat. Georgians who had taken the king's oaths disappeared and the Redcoats found themselves unable to control much more than the actual ground their regular army occupied. These professional soldiers from the fortified garrisons in New York and East Florida continued to win the formal battles only to lose the war to a widespread popular resistance that won by keeping the insurgency going indefinitely. British leaders had been led to believe that thousands of frontiersmen remained willing to fight for the king's cause in a campaign of Americanizing the war. The hundreds of men who did turn out under leaders like Boyd, however, actually came from socially isolated frontier communities of Quakers, Baptists, bandits, ex-North Carolina Regulators, Irish emigrants, Palatines, white men who lived with the Indians, Native Americans, freed/self-emancipated blacks, and other perennial social outsiders from the frontier mainstream society. These "Loyalists" acted more as refugees trying to find protection than as committed combatants. Even the survivors of Kettle Creek and Taitt's warriors who reached Savannah proved to be of little military value to the king George iii New Government