id on the Spanish possessions as for a defence against the
Indians. Nevertheless they did some service in preventing any actual
assault on the place by the latter, while they prevented any possible
uprising by the French, though the harassed Creoles, under this added
burden of military lawlessness, in many instances accepted the offers
made them by the Spaniards and passed over to the French villages on the
west side of the Mississippi.

Clark Seizes a Spanish Boat.

Before Clark left Vincennes, he summoned a court of his militia
officers, and got them to sanction the seizure of a boat loaded with
valuable goods, the property of a Creole trader from the Spanish
possessions. The avowed reason for this act was revenge for the wrongs
perpetrated in like manner by the Spaniards on the American traders; and
this doubtless was the controlling motive in Clark's mind; but it was
also true that the goods thus confiscated were of great service to Clark
in paying his mutinous and irregularly employed troops, and that this
fact, too, had influence with him.

The Backwoodsmen Approve Clark's Deed.

The more violent and lawless among the backwoodsmen of Kentucky were
loud in exultation over this deed. They openly declared that it was not
merely an act of retaliation on the Spaniards, but also a warning that,
if they did not let the Americans trade down the river, they would not
be allowed to trade up it; and that the troops who garrisoned Vincennes
offered an earnest of what the frontiersmen would do in the way of
raising an army of conquest if the Spaniards continued to wrong them.
[Footnote: Draper MSS. Minutes of Court-Martial, Summoned by George
Rogers Clark, at Vincennes, October 18, 1786.] They defied the
Continental Congress and the seaboard States to interfere with them.
They threatened to form an independent government, if the United States
did not succor and countenance them. They taunted the eastern men with
knowing as little of the West as Great Britain knew of America. They
even threatened that they would, if necessary, re-join the British
dominions, and boasted that, if united to Canada, they would some day be
able themselves to conquer the Atlantic Commonwealths. [Footnote: State
Dept. MSS. Reports of John Jay, No. 124, vol. iii., pp. 31, 37, 44, 48,
53, 56, etc.]

Both the Federal and the Virginia authorities were much alarmed and
angered, less at the insult to Spain than at the threat of establishing
a