rench villages were ruled
by British officers commanding small bodies of regular soldiers or Tory
rangers and Creole partizans. The towns were completely in the power
of the British government; none of the American States had actual
possession of a foot of property in the Northwestern Territory.

The Northwest was acquired in the midst of the Revolution only by armed
conquest, and if it had not been so acquired, it would have remained a
part of the British Dominion of Canada.

The man to whom this conquest was clue was a famous backwoods leader,
a mighty hunter, a noted Indian-fighter, George Rogers Clark. He was a
very strong man, with light hair and blue eyes. He was of good Virginian
family. Early in his youth, he embarked on the adventurous career of
a backwoods surveyor, exactly as Washington and so many other young
Virginians of spirit did at that period. He traveled out to Kentucky
soon after it was founded by Boone, and lived there for a year, either
at the stations or camping by him self in the woods, surveying, hunting,
and making war against the Indians like any other settler; but all the
time his mind was bent on vaster schemes than were dreamed of by the
men around him. He had his spies out in the Northwestern Territory, and
became convinced that with a small force of resolute backwoodsmen he
could conquer it for the United States. When he went back to Virginia,
Governor Patrick Henry entered heartily into Clark's schemes and gave
him authority to fit out a force for his purpose.

In 1778, after encountering endless difficulties and delays, he finally
raised a hundred and fifty backwoods riflemen. In May they started down
the Ohio in flatboats to undertake the allotted task. They drifted and
rowed downstream to the Falls of the Ohio, where Clark founded a log
hamlet, which has since become the great city of Louisville.

Here he halted for some days and was joined by fifty or sixty
volunteers; but a number of the men deserted, and when, after an eclipse
of the sun, Clark again pushed off to go down with the current, his
force was but about one hundred and sixty riflemen. All, however, were
men on whom he could depend--men well used to frontier warfare. They
were tall, stalwart backwoodsmen, clad in the hunting-shirt and leggings
that formed the national dress of their kind, and armed with the
distinctive weapon of the backwoods, the long-barreled, small-bore
rifle.

Before reaching the Mississippi the l