scalps. Knowing that all the irruptions
of savages into Kentucky were encouraged and set on foot from Kaskaskia,
Vincennes and Detroit, he suddenly resolved upon the bold project of
capturing these strongholds. This would put the British upon the
defensive, relieve the frontiers of Kentucky, Virginia and
Pennsylvania, and in the end add a vast territory to the domain of the
republic. In the accomplishment of all these designs the soil of
Kentucky was to be used as a base of operations.

It is not the purpose of this work to give a history of the Clark
campaigns, nor of the daring stratagems of that great leader in
effecting his purposes. Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, each in turn
fell into his hands, and when Henry Hamilton, the British
lieutenant-governor at Detroit, received the astounding news that the
French on the Mississippi and the Wabash had sworn allegiance to the
Americans, he abandoned his enterprise of capturing Fort Pitt and at
once entered upon a campaign to retrieve the lost possessions and
"sweep" the Kentuckians out of the country. His scheme was formidable.
With a thousand men, and with artillery to demolish the stockades and
destroy the frontier posts, he proposed to drive the settlers back
across the mountains. "Undoubtedly," says Roosevelt, "he would have
carried out his plan, and have destroyed all the settlements west of the
Alleghenies, had he been allowed to wait until the mild weather brought
him his host of Indian allies and his reinforcements of regulars and
militia from Detroit." How Clark with his Virginians and Kentuckians,
and a few French allies from the western posts, anticipated his attack,
swam the drowned lands of the Wabash, and surprised him at Vincennes,
has been well told. Instead of "sweeping" Kentucky, the "hair-buyer"
general was taken a prisoner to the dungeons of Virginia, and the
newborn possessions were erected into the county of Illinois.

For a number of years following the revolution, there were those in the
east, and especially in New England, who suffered from myopia. They
utterly failed to see the future of the republic, or the importance of
holding the western country. To them, such men as Harrod and Kenton,
Logan and Boone, were "lawless borderers" and willful aggressors on the
rights of the red man. And yet, back of the crowning diplomacy of John
Jay, that placed our western frontiers on the banks of the Mississippi,
and extended our northern lines to the t