Always trying to make money, Eaton was hired to haul back to campus the college bell, which had been repaired. In transit, he hung it under the farm cart, and so it pealed throughout his return journey. A classmate asked: How did you feel making so much noise? “I felt bell-igerant,” he replied. A professor scolded him for alarming the townspeople and asked, “Do you not forget your reputation as a student at the college?” Eaton answered: “I did not forget, Sir, but I am a member of the Dartmouth belles-lettres society.” Eaton told a friend who saw him riding into town with the bell clanging: “I am resolved not to go through the world without making a noise in it.”
Dartmouth granted Eaton his long-sought degree of Bachelor of Arts on August 25, 1790, and soon after he landed a job as clerk in the Vermont House of Delegates. But that position was a mere stopover on Eaton’s newly chosen career path to join the military. At the State House, he met one of the first of his Federalist patrons, General Stephen R. Bradley, senator from Vermont, who used connections to gain for the twenty-six-year-old Eaton an appointment as captain in the United States Army. (In those early days, the nation was quite divided over the need for a standing federal army; Jefferson’s Republicans then used to ask: Couldn’t state militias handle the job without the nation running the risk of some charismatic general trying to subvert democracy?)
Around this time, Eaton joined the Freemasons, a secretive society full of high-ranking Federalists. At his swearing-in ceremony, Eaton chose a telling “makr,” or personal motto: “I will spare the vanquish’d and pull down the proud.” (Eaton’s targets for the latter half of that motto would include: Reverend Clark Brown, Commodore Richard Morris, Captain James Barron, Bey Hamouda of Tunis, Bashaw Yussef of Tripoli, Admiral Murad Rais, Army Captain Butler, Army Colonel Gaither, diplomat Tobias Lear, and President Thomas Jefferson, among many others.) William Eaton clearly had a problem with authority.
In August 1792, the newly minted young captain in his smart blue uniform married General Danielson’s wealthy young widow, honeymooned with her about a weekend or so (long enough to get Eliza pregnant), then hurried off to join his army unit. Captain Eaton’s mission called for him to serve under General “Mad Anthony” Wayne on his campaign to subdue the Indian tribes in the Ohio Valley wilderness. This mission would magnify Eaton’s love of country and would hone his military skills beyond reading Caesar’s Commentaries and washing Revolutionary War dishes. Ever the daredevil, he took frequent unassigned scouting excursions on the west or “Indian Side” of the Ohio, where he saw “tracks of dear, bear and buffaloes . . . and here and there a moccasin.” The spectacular grandeur of unspoiled nature—“sycamore, elm, beach, aspin, hickory, walnut, maple . . . large beyond credibility”—intoxicated Eaton with the opportunities for national expansion.
During this campaign, Eaton tasted more combat—skirmishes and ambushes—than during his three and a half years in the Continental Army. He helped oversee General Wayne’s building of Fort Recovery, which stood on the site of one of the worst U.S. losses—and greatest Indian victories—in American history: General St. Clair’s defeat by Chief Little Turtle when one-third of the American force of 1,748 was killed, including 57 women following the troops.
Eaton idolized forty-seven-year-old General Wayne and would model his own style of command after Wayne’s. Some generals speechify then retreat to a hilltop to drain a pot of coffee. “Mad Anthony” personally led the troops. “When in danger, he is in his element,” Eaton wrote, “and never shows to so good advantage as when leading a charge.” As to his character, Eaton described him as “industrious, indefatigable, determined . . . not over accessible but studious to reward merit.” Eaton noted flaws as well: “He is in some degree susceptible to adulation, as is every man who has an honest thirst for military fame.” Tellingly, Eaton added: “He endures fatigue and hardship with a fortitude uncommon to men of his years; I have seen him in the most severe night of the winter of ’94, sleep on the ground like his fellow soldier, and walk around his camp at four in the morning with the vigilance of a sentinel.”
Eaton, though raised in farm country New England and refined at bookish Dartmouth, forced himself to toughen up like Wayne. “[I have] slept more than a hundred nights in that same wilderness, and as many miles back from the Ohio, on the naked, sometimes frozen ground with nothing but a cloak or a blanket, frequently in hail, rain and snow—amidst the yellings of wolves and savages.”