(from Walter Havighurst, George Rogers Clark—
Soldier in the West)
LIKE GEORGE WASHINGTON, George Rogers Clark was recognized in his early manhood as a leader. Tall and rugged with red hair and high cheekbones. Clark won fame in Lord Dunmore’s War(1774) and later as an Indian fighter. His prowess earned him the Indian sobriquet “the first man living, the great and invincible Long Knife.”
He was also the great persuader. In 1776, at age twenty-four, he called a meeting of the frontier forts in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Wanting recognition and protection as a county, he was elected to lead a delegation to Virginia to seek a more definitive connection between Kentucky and Virginia. Patrick Henry, governor of Virginia, and his executive counsel granted Clark five hundred pounds of gunpowder to defend Kentucky, and the General Assembly made Kentucky a county of Virginia.
The year 1777 was known as the “Bloody ’77.” The western settlements were attacked continuously. The British lieutenant governor Henry Hamilton, the “hair-buyer,” was paying hefty prices for American scalps and prisoners. In response, Clark was made lieutenant colonel in charge of a force of 370 men divided into seven companies. Relying on intelligence from two spies, Clark decided to attack Kaskaskia, a fortified Virginia outpost on the Mississippi along the water routes that led to Detroit, the supply depot for the Indians. In June 1778 Clark with 175 men marched over land for six days and, without firing a shot, took the fort by surprise. He persuaded the French there and in neighboring towns to join forces with him. He then summoned Indian tribes from as far away as five hundred miles. In a speech he offered the Indians a red belt of war or the white belt of peace, and thereby persuaded them to remain neutral during the coming campaign.
Hamilton moved down from Detroit with his men via the Maumee and Wabash Rivers, to block Clark at Vincennes, Illinois. Clark realized he could not maintain his foothold if, in the spring, Hamilton was resupplied and reinforced by Indians. He decided to attack Vincennes in “the depth of winter,” writing Patrick Henry that if he failed, “this country and also Kentucky is lost.”
From historian Walter Havighurst, George Rogers Clark—Soldier in the West, this is the story of Clark’s extraordinary march. A bullet through the breast of a British soldier announced Clark’s arrival. Clark’s sharpshooters peppered the fort. Behind a slight hill, Clark paraded a few of his men carrying flags. Back and forth they marched. All Hamilton could see were the moving flags, and hear the shouts. Clark’s ruse made 172 men look like 600. Within thirty-six hours Hamilton surrendered.
Clark’s superhuman swamp march, his willpower, his inspiring leadership, his contagious spirit of invincibility, his oratory, his strategic thinking, and his deft bluff-and-bully tactics delivered huge chunks of the southern portion of the Old Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota) into American hands. Clark’s conquests helped establish the Great Lakes as the northern boundary of the United States.
ADESPERATE SITUATION needs desperate resolution —there was no alternative. The more George Rogers Clark thought of it the more inevitable his plan became.
That night he called his captains and told them. They were silent, doubtful, fearful. He talked a little more, acknowledging the hardships and dangers of the march. But the season being so hostile, no enemy would suppose that an attack could come over an impassable country. An enemy off guard is an enemy half beaten; surprise is stronger than an arsenal. Slowly the doubting captains began to speak. “Yes, we took Kaskaskia by surprise.” …“Yes, the time is favorable.” “Yes, we can capture the ‘Hair-buyer’!”
Boldness is a strong contagion. Now all Kaskaskia came to life with courage and resolve. French volunteers offered to join the desperate march. Citizens brought provisions, blankets, boots, caps, mufflers, mittens. Clark would need stores of ammunition for his attack and a cannon to breach the heavy walls of the fort. With funds borrowed from Merchant Vigo, he bought a Mississippi flatboat, mounted six small cannon on the deck, and loaded the cabin with supplies. This was the Willing, the first gunboat on the western rivers. Aboard it marched Captain John Rogers, Clark’s cousin, and forty men, mostly from Cahokia. On the gray fourth day of February, shortly after noon, they pushed into the current of the swollen Kaskaskia River. They would go down the Mississippi, up the Ohio, up the Wabash. Below Vincennes they would hide in the river thickets, waiting the arrival of Clark’s regiment across the prairies.
While the Willing disappeared around a bend of the river, Clark sat in his office writing a message to Governor Patrick Henry: “…I know the case is desperate; but Sir, we must either quit the country or attack…. Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted. Perhaps we may be fortunate.”
It was a hazardous, perilous plan, against enormous odds. That night George Rogers Clark sat late beside the fire. Perhaps we may be fortunate …
On the fifth day of February, 1779, while drums rolled in the fort yard, the citizens of Kaskaskia lined the street below. In the stockade Father Gibault raised his hand; the drums ceased and the priest said a simple heartfelt blessing. As the drums rolled again, Clark’s regiment filed out the fort gate in a thin cold rain. It was midafternoon; all morning the captains had been busy, inspecting the men’s clothing, ammunition, and provisions, tallying the pack ponies and their loads of tents, baggage, and supplies. Now in mingled French and English the towns-folk cried out their last farewells.
The men marched steadily, followed by the plodding pack train. Soon they were on the empty prairie. Behind them, in the cold seep of the rain, lay the huddled houses of Kaskaskia; behind was Merchant Vigo who had counted out money for the campaign, the old men who had given rifle balls and powder, the women who had stitched twenty flags for their soldiers to raise from the roofs and bastions of Vincennes. Behind was the warmth of familiar hearth fires; ahead lay 200 miles of soaking prairie and drowned bottom land, and at the end a superior enemy waited in a massive fort. Hour after hour they tramped on. Some remembered what was behind them, some thought of what was ahead. Some, perhaps, just marched. Long-striding Virginians and Kentuckians in deerskin jackets, dark-eyed French-Americans in match coats and mackinaws, they marched together in the rain. In all they were 130 men.
Six miles out on the prairie the winter dusk came down. They made their camp on desolate ground; they ate a cold supper washed down with smoking tea. They huddled over reluctant fires, trying to dry their boots and mackinaws. They rolled in their blankets and slept on sodden earth; before daylight they were on their way again. Hour after hour they slogged through mud and mire under a sky the color of wet ashes. A file of stubborn, plodding men, they made twenty-seven miles before they pitched their square camp in the winter dusk, baggage in the middle, sentries posted all around. The third day brought great flat plains of standing water, and the rain kept falling. With a kind of incredulity the men remembered when sunlight washed a green and fragrant prairie; now they gave up thought of warmth and dryness. They splashed on toward a watery horizon.
But the commander kept their spirits burning. Each day he sent out mounted hunters at the sign of game. They came back with quarters of venison and buffalo, and at the end of the day’s march one of the four companies gave a feast. They ate like a war party on a triumphant raid. Tearing juicy flesh from bones, grinning with greasy, bearded faces, gulping down their burning whisky ration, they feasted together. Clark passed from one supper fire to another, a hulking, mud-smeared man with a gruff humor, sampling the joints of smoking meat and nodding approval of the cooking. He was a commander with a kind of triumph in him, not seeming to think of the hardships, the hazards, the desperate test ahead. So, feasting and laughing, singing rowdy songs and whooping like savages, the men forgot the misery of the march. The hot food roused their blood, and the whooping raised their courage. They were young men, in a wild new country, on a mission of daring.
During the day’s march, Clark often gave his horse to the hunters and fell in with the men. Sometimes he swung along in silence, his big feet sloshing up and down. But he was mysteriously aware of the army’s spirit. He knew when the men were grim with weariness and when their thoughts went ahead with uncertainty and fear. At those times his ragged voice lifted a song or raised a war whoop, and gradually the other voices took it up until the whole wretched regiment sang and shouted under the desolate sky. At weary stretches of mud he set out on a lumbering run, challenging them all to a footrace. At the edge of swollen creeks he held his rifle high and lunged into the water with a savage war cry. So he kept them going; they took fire, like wet faggots, from his own nerve and will. They finished the day’s march and devoured their food like a gaunt wolf pack in the firelight. They held numb and swollen hands to the blaze; the leather steamed and stiffened on their feet. They slept in sodden blankets and they did not complain.
On February 13, a week away from Kaskaskia, they reached the Little Wabash. That small river was now a vast flood, five miles across, with the drowned bottoms of the Embarrass River and the swollen Wabash beyond. They were sixty-three forbidding miles from Vincennes. From that camp Clark stared at the gray water, knee-deep, waist-deep, sometimes shoulder-deep. Now a third of his men were shaking with chills and fever. It was five miles to the hills on the opposite shore, and over all that plain of water the cold rain kept falling. Clark ordered his strongest men to take axes, to fell poplar logs, to hollow out canoes. In the first crude craft he sent a party ahead to build a landing platform on the distant shore. Into other canoes they loaded their sick and their baggage. Then they were ready to march.
Clark took the lead, plunging into waist-deep water, lifting his long rifle overhead. The men splashed after him. In that numbing water he kept their courage alive. Time after time he promised land ahead; when the water rose about his waist, he broke into the strains of “A Soldier’s Life” or “Billy of the Wild Woods” or “A Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn.” At last they reached the wooded shore. They landed their baggage and helped their sick ashore. Provisions were short, but Clark was more concerned with secrecy than hunger. He ordered short rations and no firing of guns.
They made a cheerful camp, laughing over their nightmare march, repeating a dozen times how in deep water the drummer boy had crawled onto his drum and floated on it like a raft. Strengthened by hardship, made bold by difficulty, they thought nothing could stop them. Now they spoke of the formidable Wabash, as a creek; they would find a way to cross it. And when they reached Vincennes—Before the fires died down, there was talk of marching on Detroit.
That night, lying sleepless in a wet blanket, Clark had his own grim realization. They were now in the enemy’s country, a flooded valley behind them, their horses abandoned with no possibility of retreat. He wondered about the Wabash; could the Willing ascend a flooded river in time to keep their rendezvous below Vincennes.
Next day they marched through endless swamps and creek bottoms. Hour after hour they stumbled through freezing mud and splashed through ice-skimmed water. It was long after dark before they stumbled on dry ground and made their desolate camp. The day that followed, and the day that followed that, were the same. At night they gnawed a handful of parched corn and slept with exhaustion.
On the evening of February 17 they reached the Embarrass River at a point nine miles from Vincennes. Those nine miles were a vast drowned bottom, broken by islanded hills and ridges. Gaunt with fatigue and hunger they marched along the Embarrass to its juncture with the Wabash. They marched grimly. Clark and his captains shouted, but the men slogged on in silence. Mud, mud, mud, mud…water, water, water, water …cold, cold, cold, cold…war, war, war, war…. In a weary, aching trance they kept moving, one foot lifting, then another, one stride more.
So they reached the Wabash. Now Vincennes was upstream, still nine miles away, across the swollen channel and the drowned bottom lands. They had no rations left—not even a rind of bacon or a handful of corn. Here they were to meet the Willing; but the flooded Wabash lay empty between the wooded hills.
“Camp Hunger” the men called it. Clark promptly had a pair of axmen hollowing out a log, and in that canoe he sent a party downstream to find the Willing. The rest waited, remembering the bushels of corn and the stacks of dried buffalo meat they had loaded on the gunboat. They watched in silence while the canoe came back, and the gaunt faces of the paddlers told the news before they voiced it. The Willing had not arrived. (The gunboat had been delayed by floodwater and was now at the mouth of the Wabash, 100 miles away.)
It was a hungry night. In the cold gray daybreak they heard a boom of a cannon—the morning gun from the frowning fort at Vincennes. At that moment General Hamilton was sitting down to a hot and hearty breakfast, but Clark gave his men no time to think of food. He kept them chopping trees and lacing logs together with fox vines from the branches; on those makeshift rafts he sent men toward Vincennes to steal boats. They poled the rafts away, and too soon they returned. A mile away they had found a camp of Indians around four large camp-fires; they dared not go farther for fear of being discovered. Again Clark sent men down river, to look for the Willing. He paced the muddy shore while his gaunt troops chewed the bark of slippery elm to quiet their stomach pains. They had not tasted food for two days.
Weak as they were, Clark kept his axmen hollowing on wet poplar logs. At noon the river sentries brought in a captured boat, and five astonished Frenchmen were led to the commander. They answered Clark’s questions readily, declaring that no one in Vincennes suspected the presence of American troops in the Wabash country. That evening a hunter came in with fresh-killed venison. One deer for 130 men—it made their hunger violent.
Next morning in the leaden dawn they ferried the Wabash, and still they were cut off from the town by miles of flooded lowland. With a muttered “March!” Clark plunged into knee-deep water. The men waded after him. All day the gray rain fell, all day they foundered on, pushing their canoes through drowned timber and across desolate bays of flood. The five Frenchmen from Vincennes were amazed at this march; they had told Clark it was impossible to reach Vincennes without a fleet of boats. When Clark asked the location of the nearest dry land, they described a sugar camp, a grove of maple trees on a rounded hill. A canoe went ahead through submerged thickets, but it could not find a passage. Then Clark went forward, wading into the deepening stream. It was cold as ice.
Waist-deep in sullen water, he turned to his men. They watched him in silence, eyes fearful and beaten, faces gaunt and hollow. Some were shaking with chills, some were dazed with fever; in all of them hunger was gnawing like an animal. Suddenly Clark raised his powder horn. He poured a pinch of precious gunpowder into his wet hand and smeared the black mixture on his face. His voice went up in a frenzied, yowling war whoop; in it sounded hunger, grimness, desperation, but it ended in a fierce defiance. He turned then and lunged into the stream. For a moment the men stared blankly, eyes dead as cinders in their famished faces. Then one man blacked his own cheeks and plunged in. Another followed, and another; the gaunt regiment was moving. Ahead of them Clark lifted his rifle. His ragged voice began a song, and behind him, in a thin and growing chorus, the men joined in. They were a wretched, starving, and exhausted army—singing.
At last they felt firm ground beneath their feet. They followed it through a chaos of brush and bending willow branches. It led to a half acre of mounded land, covered with bare maple trees. They made their camp in the sugar grove. It was a cold night but they slept like dead.
In the morning the Frenchmen from Vincennes pointed to the broad Horseshoe Plain—not a plain now but a gray sea covering a great sickle bend of the Wabash. The sky had cleared in the night and a yellow sun rose over the woodlands. Clark stood among his silent men. This was the final march, he told them. In two hours they would see the roofs of Vincennes. There could be no weakness now.
He stationed Major Bowman in the rear with orders to shoot any man who faltered or turned back. Then he led the way. Out in the desolate Horseshoe Plain there were no half-drowned bushes to grasp at, no trees to cling to.
Clark ordered canoes to carry the weakest men, to land them on the far shore, and to return for others. The rest struggled on, arms around each other’s shoulders, floundering toward the land. There was no singing now. Even the commander kept silent, but he kept advancing. When at last they reached a brushy ridge, they would have sunk down, numb and exhausted, but Clark kept them on their feet. They chopped branches and started fires. The strong men dragged the weak around and around the burning embers until their clothing had dried and the blood was brisk in their veins.
When a sentry reported a craft on the water, Clark sent a party after it. They captured a large canoe paddled by Indian women; in it were buffalo meat, corn, tallow, and a nest of blackened kettles. Hungry eyes glittered while the kettles warmed on the fire. Broth was fed to the weak and fevered men; all of them had a ration of corn. It was not a feast, but it quickened sluggish blood and put strength into exhausted muscles. With new spirit they pushed on.
In canoes and afoot they crossed another mile of flood land and came to the brushy knob of Warrior’s Island, with sunlight slanting through its winter trees. From there Clark gazed across two miles of flat and open country to Post Vincennes—the houses scattered along the river, the timbered church and the long stockade of the fort with its five frowning blockhouses catching the rays of the sinking sun. Around him stood his men, staring at the goal of their impossible march.