d-handed with scalps hanging at their
belts.

Clark was not slow to show his power.

"Think, men," he said sternly, "of the cries of the widows and the
fatherless on our frontier. Do your duty."

Six of the savages were tomahawked before the fort, where the
garrison could see them, and their dead bodies were thrown into the
river.

The British defended their fort for a few days, but could not stand
against the fire of the long rifles. It was sure death for a gunner
to try to fire a cannon. Not a man dared show himself at a porthole,
through which the rifle bullets were humming like mad hornets.

Hamilton the "hair buyer" gave up the defense as a bad job, and
surrendered the fort, defended by cannon and occupied by regular
troops, as he says in his journal, "to a set of uncivilized Virginia
backwoodsmen armed with rifles."

Tap! tap! sounded the drums, as Clark gave the signal, and down came
the British colors.

Thirteen cannon boomed the salute over the flooded plains of the
Wabash, and a hundred frontier soldiers shouted themselves hoarse
when the stars and stripes went up at Vincennes, never to come down
again.

The British authority over this region was forever at an end. It only
remained for Clark to defend what he had so gallantly won.

{17} Of all the deeds done west of the Alleghanies during the war of
the Revolution, Clark's campaign, in the region which seemed so
remote and so strange to our forefathers, is the most remarkable. The
vast region north of the Ohio River was wrested from the British
crown. When peace came, a few years later, the boundary lines of the
United States were the Great Lakes on the north, and on the west the
Mississippi River.

{18}

CHAPTER II
A MIDWINTER CAMPAIGN

A splendid monument overlooks the battlefield of Saratoga. Heroic
bronze statues of Schuyler, Gates, and Morgan, three of the four
great leaders in this battle, stand each in a niche on three faces of
the obelisk. On the south side the space is empty. The man who led
the patriots to victory forfeited his place on this monument. What a
sermon in stone is the empty niche on that massive granite shaft! We
need no chiseled words to tell us of the great name so gallantly won
by Arnold the hero, and so wretchedly lost by Arnold the traitor.

Only a few months after Benedict Arnold had turned traitor, and was
fighting against his native land, he was sent by Sir Henry Clinton,
the British commander, to sack a