t in December with his own make-shift army, Clark's men had to
abandon Vincennes and flee west to Kaskaskia. All seemed lost.

Again the refusal of the Americans to follow European military
conventions paid off. Clark, ignoring the tradition to go into winter
quarters took Vincennes in the dead of winter with less than 130 men,
many of them French. It was the most remarkable single military feat of
the Revolution. Only men who had lived in the frontier wilderness could
have endured the march. Despite wading waist-deep through flooding rivers
and swamps in freezing February snowstorms, going days without warm food,
poorly clothed, and carrying only the minimum supply of gunpowder and
shot, Clark and his men reached Vincennes determined to fight. Learning
that he had arrived undetected by the British, Clark ordered great
bonfires lit, both to warm his frozen men and to deceive Hamilton.
Watching dancing shadows of seemingly countless men whooping and shouting
in front of the fires, Hamilton concluded he was hopelessly outnumbered.
The next morning, February 24, 1779, the bold Clark demanded Hamilton's
surrender. At first the governor refused, but a series of well placed
rifle shots took the fight out of the defenders. Then Clark ordered
several Indians, caught in the act of taking scalps into the fort,
tomahawked in full view of the fort. Hamilton agreed to surrender. Clark
sent Hamilton under heavy guard to Virginia, passing through the Kentucky
settlements his Indians had harassed. Ignoring protests from the British,
Governor Jefferson refused to exchange Hamilton, keeping him in irons in
the Williamsburg jail until November 1780 when the prisoner finally
agreed to sign a parole not to fight against the Americans or to go among
the Indians.[43] Clark was treated shamefully by the Virginia Assembly
after the war and was never fully reimbursed for his personal expenses in
the west.

[43] For a dramatic, but not inaccurate, account of the
expedition and Clark, read John Bakeless, Background to Glory:
The Story of George Rogers Clark (Lippincott: Philadelphia,
1957.)

For Clark the capture of Vincennes was to be a prelude to taking Detroit.
In both 1779 and 1780 he planned marches to the center of British western
power. Neither time could he bring off a coordinated attack. The frontier
was under too heavy pressure from the Ohio Indians led by Tory Henry Bird
and the infamous renegade, Simon Girty.