Johnson reported upon arriving at the ruins of Fort Bull that he "found within the fort twenty-three soldiers, two women and one Battoe Man, some burned almost to ashes, others inhumanely butchered & all scalped...I imagine the whole number killed or missing is 62, thirty of which I found and buried". Johnson also reported that several of the corpses were missing organs, such as their hearts, which he knowing the customs of the Iroquois, led him to argue that the missing organs had been eaten (the Iroquois believed that one could gain the bravery of a brave man by eating his heart). Johnson buried all of the bodies he found in the ruins of Fort Bull in a mass grave as he was unable to identify the corpses. The French accounts do not mention either the scalping or the cannibalism alleged by Johnson, and since that French and Canadian historians vehemently denied these allegations. British propaganda later made much of the allegations that the men at Fort Bull had been scalped, but Chartrand wrote that there were only six Iroquois warriors present during the battle, two of whom were killed, so it is unlikely that the majority of the people killed at Fort Bull were scalped when they were alive, though it is conceivable that the remaining Iroquois did take scalps as was their custom. However, it is possible that after the battle that the Iroquois did scalp the corpses as a gesture of disrespect to the British. Chartrand further noted that when whites, especially Anglo-American whites, were defeated by Indian forces that the actions were always branded a "massacre" rather than a "battle", which provided "an excuse of sorts" for the defeat. In this regard, Chartrand denied there was a massacre at Fort Bull, writing that most of the defenders were killed when the powder magazine exploded after catching fire after an Iroquois warrior accidentally set it alight, and the claim of a "massacre" was simply a way of explaining away a defeat.