Book I WHEN RED MEN RULED (continued 2)

Very well De Peyster knew Matchekewis, the puissant chief who

at Michilimackinac in Pontiac's war. It was Matchekewis himself who kicked the ball over the pickets, and rushing in with his band fell on the unprepared ranks of the British garrison. On the reoccupation of Mackinac, Matchekewis had been sent to Quebec and imprisoned, but, released and dismissed with honours and a buffalo barbecue, now he was leading his Chippewas for the King.

All this was part of a wider scheme, devised in London, for the subjugation of the Mississippi.

XV THE ATTACK ON ST. LOUIS

Scarce had Clark time to set his men to work on Fort Jefferson, on the Chickasaw Bluffs overlooking the Mississippi, before he received two other expresses, one from Montgomery, one from the Spanish Governor himself,—"Haste, haste to our relief."

Not wishing to alarm his men, Clark picked out a strong escort,—"I shall be gone a few days. Finish the fort. Keep a constant guard."

They thought he had gone to Kentucky.

All through the year 1779 the Frenchmen remembered Clark's warning. At last, so great became the general apprehension, that the people themselves, directed by Madame Rigauche, the school-mistress, erected a sort of defence of logs and earth, five or six feet high, and posted a cannon in each of the three gates.

"Pouf! Pouf!" laughed the Governor. But he did not interfere.

But so many days elapsed, so little sign of change appeared in the accustomed order of things, that the reassured Frenchmen went on as usual digging in their fields, racing their horses, and clicking their billiard balls. Night after night they played their fiddles and danced till dawn on their footworn puncheon floors.

And all the while the Lake Indians of the North were planning and counselling. All through the Spring they were gathering at rendezvous, paddling down Lake Michigan's shore into the Chicago River, and then by portage into the Illinois, where they set up the cry, "On to St. Louis!"

So long had been the fear allayed, so much the rumour discredited, that when old man Quenelle came back across the river, white with excitement, the people listened to his tale as of one deranged.

"What? Do you ask? What?" His teeth chattered. "Ducharme, Ducharme the absconder, meet me across te river an' say—'Te Injun comin'!' Fifteen huntert down te river of te Illinois!"

Terrified was the old man. Hearers gathered round plying him with questions. The incredulous laughed at his incoherence. "What? What?" he gasped. "You laugh?" Some believed him. Dismay began to creep over the more timid ones.

"What is it?" inquired the burly Governor De Leyba, bustling up. "What? That same old yarn to frighten the people? Quenelle is an old dotard. Take him to prison." Thus reassured, again the people went on with work, games, festivity.

But now the people of Cahokia became excited. Early in March Colonel Gratiot sent a boatload of goods for trade to Prairie du Chien. It was captured by Indians on the Mississippi. Breathless half-breed runners reported the apparition upon the waters,—"All te waves black with canoes. A great many sauvages."

"Clark," was the spoken and unspoken thought of all. "Clark, the invincible, where is he?"

Some said, "He is camped with his Long Knives in the American Bottom."

"No, he is building a fort at the Chickasaw Bluffs."

Hurriedly the villagers prepared an express for Clark. Charles Gratiot was sent, the brainiest man in Cahokia, one who could speak English, and, moreover, a great friend of Clark.

On the swiftest canoe Charles Gratiot launched amid the prayers of Cahokia. Down he swept on the Mississippi with the precious papers calling for succour. Safely he passed a thousand snags, safely reached the bluffs of Chickasaw, and saw the fort. Toiling up he gave his message.

"Colonel Clark? He is gone. We think he left for Louisville." Without delay a messenger was dispatched to follow his supposed direction.

Meanwhile, Clark and his soldiers, joining Montgomery by land, had hurried to Cahokia. Immediately he crossed to St. Louis. It was the feast of Corpus Christi, May 25. Service in the little log chapel was over.

"Come," said the people in holiday attire, "Let us gather strawberries on the flowery mead."

From their covert, peeped the Indians. "To-morrow!" they said, "to-morrow!"

Out of the picnic throng, with lap full of flowers, the beautiful Donna ran to greet her lover.

"So long"—she drew a sigh—"I haf watched and waited!" Love had taught her English. Never had the Donna appeared so fair, with shining eyes and black hair waving on her snowy shoulders.

With tumultuous heart Colonel Clark bent and kissed her. "Vengeance I swear on any Indian that shall ever mar this lovely head!" Then crushing her hand with the grip of a giant,—"Wait a little, my dear, I must see your brother the Governor."

Outside the maiden waited while Clark entered the Government House.

At last Don Francisco De Leyba was come to his senses: "I fear, but I conceal from de people. I sent for Lieutenant Cartabona from de Ste. Genevieve. He haf arrived with twenty-five soldier. Will you not command of both side de river? I need you. You promised."

De Leyba wore a long scarf of crape for his lately deceased wife. Clark had never seen him look so ill; he was worn out and trembling. The ruffle at his wrist shook like that of a man with palsy.

Clark took the nervous hand in his own firm grasp.

"Certainly, my friend, I will do everything in my power. What are your defences?"

"We haf a stockade, you note it? De cannon at gates? I assure de people no danger, de rumour false; I fear dey scarce will believe now." Together they went out to review Cartabona's soldiers and the works of defence.

"Le Colonel Clark! Le Colonel Clark!" the people cheered as he passed. "Now we are safe!"

De Leyba had sent out a hunter to shoot ducks for the Colonel's dinner. And while the Governor and Clark were in discussion, the hunter met a spy.

"Who commands at Cahokia?" inquired the stranger.

"Colonel Clark; he has arrived with a great force."

"Colonel Clark! Oh, no," answered the spy in amazement, "that cannot be! Clark is in Kentucky. We have just killed an express with dispatches to him there."

"I don't know about that," answered the hunter, in his turn surprised. "Colonel Clark is at this moment in St. Louis, and I have been sent to kill some ducks for his dinner."

The stranger disappeared.

Clark was in St. Louis about two hours. "Cartabona is here. I shall be ready to answer his slightest signal. Be sure I shall answer." He turned to go.

"Going? No, no, Señor Colonel, I cannot permit—" The hands of Governor De Leyba shook still more. "I expect you to dine,—haf sent a hunter for ducks."

But when did George Rogers Clark ever stop to eat when there was fighting on hand? Hastily recrossing the river, he put Cahokia into immediate defence.

The next day dawned clear and bright, but the people, wearied with all-night dancing, slumbered late. Grandfather Jean Marie Cardinal had not danced. He was uncommonly industrious that morning. Hastening away in the dewy dawn, he went to planting corn in his slightly plowed fields. Gradually others strolled out on the Grand Prairie. It was high noon when an Indian down by the spring caught the eye of Grandfather Jean Marie Cardinal.

"He must not give the alarm," thought the savage, so on the instant he slew and scalped him where he stood.

Then all was tumult. The people in the village heard the sound of firearms. Lieutenant Cartabona and his garrison fired a gunshot from the tower to warn the scattered villagers in the fields. Erelong they came stumbling into the north gate half dead with fright and exhaustion.

"The Chippewas! The Chippewas!"

They had crossed the river and murdered the family of François Bellhome.

"Sacre Dieu! le Sauvage! la Tour! la Tour!" cried the frantic habitants, but the tower was occupied by Cartabona and his coward soldiers.

Every man rushed to the Place des Armes, powder-horn and bullet-pouch in hand.

"To arms! To arms!" was the terrified cry.

"Where is the garrison? Where is the Governor?"

But they came not forth. Cartabona and his men continued to garrison the tower. The Governor cowered in the Government House with doors shut and barricaded. Women and children hid in the houses, telling their beads.

It was about noon when the quick ear of Clark, over in Cahokia, heard the cannonading and small arms in St. Louis. He sent an express.

"Here, Murray and Jaynes, go over the river and inquire the cause."

Slipping through the cottonwood trees, the express met an old negro woman on a keen run for Cahokia. She screamed, "Run, Boston, run! A great many salvages!"

All together ran back, just in time to meet Colonel Clark marching out of the east gate. In the thick woods of Cahokia Creek he caught a view of the foe. "Boom!" rang his brass six-pounder,—tree-tops and Indians fell together.

Amazed at this rear fire the Indians turned in confusion. One terrified look,—"It is the Long Knife! We have been deceived. We will not fight the Long Knife!" With one wild whoop they scurried to their boats. The handful of traders, deserted, raised the siege and retired.

It was the period of the spring rise of the powerful and turbulent Mississippi, which, undermining its shores, dumped cottonwood trees into the river.

"The whole British army is coming on rafts!" In terror seeing the supposed foe advancing, Cartabona's soldiers began firing at the white-glancing trees on the midnight waters. On, on came the ghostly flotilla.

"Cease firing!" demanded De Leyba emerging from his retreat.

"De cowardly, skulking old Goffner! hide heself! abandon de people!" In wrath they tore toward him, sticks and stones flying. The Governor fled, and the daft Spaniards, watching the river, spiked the cannon, preparing to fly the moment the British landed.

Cahokia trembled all night long. There were noises and howls of wolves, but no Indians. Clark himself in the darkness made the rounds of his sentinels. Even through the shadows they guessed who walked at night.

"Pass, grand round, keep clear of my arms and all's well," was the successive cry from post to post in the picket gardens of old Cahokia.

With the first pale streak of dawn the sleepless habitants looked out. All was still. The Indians were gone, but over at St. Louis seven men were found dead, scalped by the retreating foe. Many more were being carried off prisoners, but Clark's pursuing party rescued thirty.

The prisoners, dragged away to the north by their captors, suffered hardships until restored at the end of the war, in 1783.

When Clark heard of the incompetence of De Leyba he was furious. On his way to the Government House, he saw the lovely Donna at her casement. Her hair was dishevelled, her eyes wet with tears. She extended her hand. Clark took one step toward her, and then pride triumphed.

"Never will I become the father of a race of cowards," and turning on his heel he left St. Louis forever.

In one month De Leyba was dead, some said by his own hand. He knew that Auguste Chouteau had gone to complain of him at New Orleans,—the people believed he had been bribed by Great Britain; he knew that only disgrace awaited him, and he succumbed to his many disasters and the universal obloquy in which he was held. He was buried in the little log chapel, beneath the altar, by the side of his wife, where his tomb is pointed out to this day.

And the beautiful Donna De Leyba? She waited and wept but Clark came not. Then, taking with her the two little orphan nieces, Rita and Perdita, she went down to New Orleans. Here for a time she lingered among friends, and at last, giving up all hope, retired to the Ursuline convent and became a nun.

Presently Auguste Chouteau returned from New Orleans with the new Governor, Don Francisco de Cruzat, who pacified fears and fortified the town with half-a-dozen circular stone turrets, twenty feet high, connected by a stout stockade of cedar posts pierced with loopholes for artillery. On the river bank a stone tower called the Half Moon, and west of it a square log tower called the Bastion, still stood within the memory of living men.

"Next year a thousand Sioux will be in the field under Wabasha," wrote Sinclair to Haldimand, his chief in Canada.

But the Sioux had no more desire to go back to "the high walled house of thunder," where the cannon sounded not "Hail to great Wabashaw!"

Their own losses were considerable, for Clark ordered an immediate pursuit. Some of the Spaniards, grateful for the succour of the Americans, crossed the river and joined Montgomery's troops in his chase after the retreating red men.

"The Americans are coming," was the scare-word at Prairie du Chien. "Better get up your furs."

With Wabasha's help the traders hastily bundled three hundred packs of their best furs into canoes, and setting fire to the remaining sixty packs, burned them, together with the fort, while they hurried away to Michilimackinac. Matchekewis went by the Lakes. "Two hundred Illinois cavalry arrived at Chicago five days after the vessels left," is the record of the Haldimand papers.

The watchfulness and energy of Clark alone saved Illinois; nevertheless, De Peyster felt satisfied, for he thought that diversion kept Clark from Detroit.

After the terror was all over, long in the annals of the fireside, the French of St. Louis related the feats of "l'année du coup."

"Auguste Chouteau, he led te defence, he and he brother."

"No, Madame Rigauche, te school-meestress, she herself touch te cannon."

"Well, at any rate, we hid in te Chouteau garden, behind te stone wall."

XVI OLD CHILLICOTHE

With a wrench at his hot heart stifled only by wrath and determination, Clark strode from St. Louis. At Cahokia French deserters were talking to Montgomery.

"A tousand British and Indians on te march to Kentucky with cannon."

"When did they start?" thundered Clark. The Frenchman dodged as if shot.

"Dey start same time dis. Colonel Bird to keep Clark busy in Kentucky so Sinclair get San Loui' an' brak up te fur trade."

For once in his life Clark showed alarm. "I know the situation of that country. I shall attempt to get there before Bird does."

Drawing Montgomery aside, he said, "And you, Colonel, chase these retreating Indians. Chase them to Michilimackinac if possible. Destroy their towns and crops, distress them, convince them that we will retaliate and thus deter them from joining the British again."

Without pausing to breathe after the fatigue of the last few days, with a small escort Clark launched a boat and went flying down to Chickasaw Bluffs. Disguised as Indians, feathered and painted, he and a few others left Fort Jefferson.

Clark's army the year before had carried glowing news of Illinois. Already emigration had set in. On the way now he met forty families actually starving because they could not kill buffaloes.

A gun?—it was a part of Clark. He used his rifle-barrelled firelock as he used his hands, his feet, his eyes, instantly, surely, involuntarily. He showed them how to strike the buffalo in a vital part, killed fourteen, and hurried on, thirty miles a day, fording stream and swamp and tangled forest to save Kentucky.

Kentucky was watching for her deliverer. Into his ear was poured the startling tale. With Simon Girty, the renegade, and six hundred Indians, down the high waters of the Miami and up the Licking, Bird came to Ruddle's station and fired his cannon. Down went the wooden palisades like a toy blockhouse before his six-pounders.

"Surrender!" came the summons from Colonel Bird.

"Yes, if we can be prisoners to the British and not to the Indians."

Bird assented. The gates were thrown open. Indians flew like dogs upon the helpless people.

"You promised security," cried Captain Ruddle.

"I cannot stop them," said Bird. "I, too, am in their power."

Madly the Indians sacked the station and killed the cattle. Loading the household goods upon the backs of the unfortunate owners, they drove them forth and gave their cabins to the flames.

The same scenes were enacted at Martin's Station. The Indians were wild for more. But Bird would not permit further devastation. He could easily have taken every fort in Kentucky, not one could have withstood his artillery; but to his honour be it said, he led his forces out.

Loaded with plunder, the wretched captives, four hundred and fifty men, women, and children, were driven away to Detroit. Whoever faltered was tomahawked.

Clark immediately called on the militia of Kentucky. Hastening to Harrodsburg he found the newcomers wild over land entries.

"Land!" they cried, "you can have all you can hold against the Indians."

It was a grewsome joke. The Indians would not even let them survey. Like a military dictator, Clark closed the land office,—"Nor will it be opened again until after this expedition."

Immediately a thousand men enlisted. Logan, Linn, Floyd, Harrod, all followed the banner of Clark. Boone and Kenton set on ahead as guides, into the land they knew so well.

"Is it not dangerous to invade the Shawnee country?" inquired one.

"I was not born in the woods to be scared by an owl," was Clark's sententious reply.

All the provisions they had for twenty-five days was six quarts of parched corn each, except what they got in the Indian country.

Canoeing down the Licking, on the first day of August they crossed the Ohio. Scarce touching shore they heard the scalp halloo. Some fell. Within fifteen minutes Clark had his axes in the forest building a blockhouse for his wounded. On that spot now stands Cincinnati.

On pressed Clark in his retaliatory dash,—before the Shawnees even suspected, the Kentuckians were at Old Chillicothe. They flew to arms, but the Long Knives swooped down with such fury that Simon Girty drew off.

"It is folly to fight such madmen."

Chillicothe went down in flames; Piqua followed; fields, gardens, more than five hundred acres of corn were razed to the level of the sod.

Piqua was Tecumseh's village; again he learned to dread and hate the white man.

"That will keep them at home hunting for a while," remarked Clark, turning back to the future Cincinnati.

XVII "DETROIT MUST BE TAKEN"

Again George Rogers Clark sped through Cumberland Gap, fair as a Tyrolean vale, to Virginia. And dashing along the same highway, down the valley of Virginia, came the minute men of the border, in green hunting shirts, hard-riders and sharp-shooters of Fincastle.

"Hey and away, and what news?"

The restless mountaineers of the Appalachians, almost as fierce and warlike as the Goths and Vandals of an earlier day, answered:

"We have broken the back of Tarleton's army at King's Mountain, Cornwallis is facing this way, and cruisers are coming up into the Chesapeake."

"Marse Gawge! Marse Gawge!"

This time it was little York, the negro, who, peeping from the slave quarters of old York and Rose, detected the stride of George Rogers Clark out under the mulberry trees.

The long, low, Virginia farmhouse was wrapped in slumber, an almost funeral pall hung over the darkened porch, as John Clark stepped out to grasp the hand of his son.

"Three of my boys in British prisons, we looked for nothing less for you, George. William alone is left."

"Girls do not count, I suppose," laughed the saucy Lucy, peeping out in her night-curls with a candle in her hand. "Over at Bowling Green the other day, when all the gallants were smiling on me, one jealous girl said, 'I do not see what there is so interesting about Lucy Clark. She is not handsome, and she has red hair.' 'Ah,' I replied, 'I can tell her. They know I have five brothers all officers in the Revolutionary army!'"

"What, Edmund gone, too?" exclaimed George. "He is but a lad!"

"Big enough to don the buff and blue, and shoulder a gun," answered the father. "He would go,—left school, led all his mates, and six weeks later was taken prisoner along with Jonathan and the whole army."

That was the fall of Charleston, in the very May when Clark was saving St. Louis.

"We are all at war," spoke up Elizabeth, the elder sister, sadly. "Even the boys drill on mimic battlefields; all the girls in Virginia are spinning and weaving clothes for the soldiers; Mrs. Washington keeps sixteen spinning-wheels busy at Mount Vernon; mother and all the ladies have given their jewels to fit out the army. Mrs. Jefferson herself led the call for contributions, and Mrs. Lewis of Albemarle collected five thousand dollars in Continental currency. Father has given up his best horses, and Jefferson impressed his own horses and waggons at Monticello to carry supplies to General Gates. All the lads in the country are moulding bullets and making gun-powder. We haven't a pewter spoon left."

"An' we niggers air raisin' fodder," ventured the ten-year-old York.

York had his part, along with his young master, William. Daily they rode together down the Rappahannock, carrying letters to Fielding Lewis at Fredericksburg. It was there, at Kenmore House, that they met Meriwether Lewis, visiting his uncle and aunt Betty, the sister of Washington. "And when she puts on his chapeau and great coat, she looks exactly like the General," said William.

"What has become of my captured Governors?" George asked of his father.

"I hear that Hamilton was offered a parole on condition that he would not use his liberty in any way to speak or influence any one against the colonies. He indignantly refused to promise that, and so was returned to close captivity. But I think when Boone came up to the legislature he used some influence; at any rate Hamilton was paroled and went with Hay to England. Rocheblave broke his parole and fled to New York."

The five fireplaces of the old Clark home roared a welcome that day up the great central chimney, and candles gleamed at evening from dormer window to basement when all the neighbours crowded in to hail "the Washington of the West."

"Now, Rose, you and Nancy bake the seed cakes and have beat biscuit," said Mrs. Clark to the fat cook in the kitchen. "York has gone after the turkeys."

"Events are in desperate straits," said George at bedtime; "I must leave at daylight." But earlier yet young William was up to gallop a mile beside his brother on the road to Richmond, whither the capital had been removed for greater safety.

"Is this the young Virginian that is sending home all the western Governors?" exclaimed the people. An ovation followed him all the way.

"What is your plan?" asked Governor Jefferson, after the fiery cavalier had been received with distinction by the Virginia Assembly.

"My plan is to ascend the Wabash in early Spring and strike before reinforcements can reach Detroit, or escape be made over the breaking ice of the Lakes. The rivers open first."

George Rogers Clark, born within three miles of Monticello, had known Jefferson all his life, and save Patrick Henry no one better grasped his plans. In fact, Jefferson had initiative and was not afraid of untried ventures.

"My dear Colonel, I have already written to Washington that we could furnish the men, provisions, and every necessary except powder, had we the money, for the reduction of Detroit. But there is no money,—not even rich men have seen a shilling in a year. Washington to the north is begging aid, Gates in the south is pleading for men and arms, and not a shilling is in the treasury of Virginia."

"But Detroit must be taken," said Clark with a solemn emphasis. "Through my aides I have this discovery: a combination is forming to the westward,—a confederacy of British and Indians,—to spread dismay to our frontier this coming Spring. We cannot hesitate. The fountain head of these irruptions must be cut off, the grand focus of Indian hostilities from the Mohawk to the Mississippi."

Even as he spoke, Jefferson, pen in hand, was noting points in another letter to Washington.

"We have determined to undertake it," wrote Jefferson, "and commit it to Clark's direction. Whether the expense of the enterprise shall be defrayed by the Continent or State we leave to be decided hereafter by Congress. In the meantime we only ask the loan of such necessaries as, being already at Fort Pitt, will save time and expense of transportation. I am, therefore, to solicit Your Excellency's order to the commandant at Fort Pitt for the articles contained in the annexed list."

Clark had the list in hand. "It is our only hope; there is not a moment to be lost."

On fleet horses the chain of expresses bore daily news to the camp of Washington, but before his answer could return, another express reined up at Richmond.

"Benedict Arnold, the traitor, has entered the Capes of Virginia with a force of two thousand men."

It was New Year's Eve and Richmond was in a tumult. On New Year's day every legislator was moving his family to a place of safety. The very winds were blowing Arnold's fleet to Richmond.

Virginia had laid herself bare of soldiers; every man that could be spared had been sent south.

And Arnold? With what rage George Rogers Clark saw him destroy the very stores that might have taken Detroit,—five brass field-pieces, arms in the Capitol loft and in waggons on the road, five tons of powder, tools, quartermaster's supplies. Then the very wind that had blown Arnold up the river turned and blew him back, and the only blood shed was by a handful of militia under George Rogers Clark, who killed and wounded thirty of Arnold's men.

"I have an enterprise to propose," said the Governor to Clark on return. "I have confidence in your men from the western side of the mountains. I want to capture Arnold and hang him. You pick the proper characters and engage them to seize this greatest of all traitors. I will undertake, if they are successful, that they shall receive five thousand guineas reward among them."

"I cannot, Arnold is gone, I must capture Detroit."

More determined than ever, Clark and Jefferson went on planning. "Yes, you must capture Detroit and secure Lake Erie. You shall have two thousand men, and ammunition and packhorses shall be at the Falls of the Ohio, March 15, ready for the early break of the ice."

Washington's consent had come, and orders for artillery. With Washington and Jefferson at his back, Clark made indefatigable efforts to raise two thousand men to rendezvous March 15.

Up the Blue Ridge his agents went and over to the Holston; he wrote to western Pennsylvania; he visited Redstone-Old-Fort, and hurried down to Fort Pitt. Fort Pitt itself was in danger.

The Wabash broke and ran untrammelled, but Clark was not ready. Cornwallis was destroying Gates at Camden; De Kalb fell, covered with wounds; Sumter was cut to pieces by Tarleton. The darkest night had come in a drama that has no counterpart, save in the Napoleonic wars that shook Europe in the cause of human liberty.

War, war, raged from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. The land was covered with forts and blockhouses. Every hamlet had its place of refuge. Mills were fortified, and private houses. Every outlying settlement was stockaded. Every log house had its pickets and portholes. Chains of posts followed the river fords and mountain gaps from Ticonderoga to the Mohawk, from the Susquehanna to the Delaware, to the Cumberland, to the Tennessee. Anxious sentinels peered from the watchtowers of wooden castles. Guns stood on the ramparts. The people slept in barracks. Moats and drawbridges, chained gates and palisades, guarded the sacred citadels of America.

"And what if England wins?" said one to Washington.

"We can still retire to the Ohio and live in freedom," for, like the last recesses of the Swiss Alps, it was thought no nation could conquer the Alleghanies.

In desperation and unaware of the Virginian crisis behind him, George Rogers Clark embarked four hundred men, all he could get of the promised two thousand. Only a line he sent to Jefferson, "I have relinquished all hope," but Jefferson at that hour was flying from Tarleton, Cornwallis was coming up into Virginia, and Washington with his ragged band of veteran Continentals was marching down to Yorktown. There was no time to glance beyond the mountains.

All the northwest, in terror of Clark, was watching and fearing. If a blow was struck anywhere, "Clark did it." Shawnees and Delawares, Wyandots at the north, Choctaws and Chickasaws and Cherokees at the south, British and Indians everywhere, were rising against devoted Kentucky.

As Clark stepped on his boats at Pittsburg word flew to remotest tribes,—

"The Long Knives are coming!"

The red man trembled in his wigwam, Detroit redoubled its fortifications, and Clark's forlorn little garrisons in the prairies of the west hung on to Illinois.

In those boats Clark bore provisions, ammunition, artillery, quartermaster's stores, collected as if from the very earth by his undying energy,—everything but men, men! Major William Croghan stood with him on the wharf at Pittsburg, burning, longing to go, but honour forbade,—he was out on parole from Charleston.

Peeping, spying, gliding, Indians down the Ohio would have attacked but for fear of Clark's cannon. The "rear guard of the Continental army" little knew the young Virginian, the terror of his name. For him, Canada staid at home to guard Detroit when she might have wrested Yorktown.

With shouts of thanksgiving Louisville greeted Clark and his four hundred; the war had come up to their very doors. Never had the Indians so hammered away at the border. Across the entire continent the late intermittent cannon shots became a constant volley.

Every family had its lost ones,—"My father, my mother, my wife, my child, they slaughtered, burned, tortured,—I will hunt the Indian till I die!"

Detroit, Niagara, Michilimackinac—the very names meant horror, for there let loose, the red bloodhounds of war, the most savage, the most awful, with glittering knives, pressed close along the Ohio. The buffalo meat for the expedition rotted while Clark struggled, anguished in spirit, a lion chained, "Stationed here to repel a few predatory savages when I would carry war to the Lakes."

But troops yet behind, "almost naked for want of linen and entirely without shoes," were trying to join Clark down the wild Ohio. Joseph Brandt cut them off,—Lochry and Shannon and one hundred Pennsylvanians,—not one escaped to tell the tale.

Clark never recovered, never forgot the fate of Lochry. "Had I tarried but one day I might have saved them!" In the night-time he seemed to hear those struggling captives dragged away to Detroit,—"Detroit! lost for the want of a few men!" For the first time the over-wrought hero gave way to intoxication to drown his grief,—and so had Clark then died, "Detroit" might have been found written on his heart.

Despair swept over Westmoreland where Lochry's men were the flower of the frontier. Only fourteen or fifteen rifles remained in Hannastown,—the Indians swooped and destroyed it utterly.

XVIII ON THE RAMPARTS

In all his anguish about Detroit, with the energy of desperation Clark now set to work making Louisville stronger than ever.

"Boys, we must have defences absolutely impregnable; we know not at what moment cannon may be booming at our gates."

A new stronghold was founded, and around it a moat eight feet deep and ten feet wide; surrounding the moat itself, was built a breastwork of log pens, filled with earth and picketed ten feet high on top of the breastwork. An acre was thus enclosed, and in that acre was a spring that bubbles still in the streets of Louisville. Within were mounted a double six-pounder captured at Vincennes, four cannon, and eight swivels, and heaped around were shells, balls, and grapeshot brought for the Detroit campaign. With bakehouse and blockhouse, bastion and barrack, no enemy ever dared attack Fort Nelson.

"General Clark is too hard on the militia," the soldier boys complained, but the hammering and pounding and digging went on until Louisville was the strongest point beyond the Alleghanies.

Back and back came the Indians, in battles and forays, and still in this troublous time settlers were venturing by flatboat and over the Wilderness Road into the Blue Grass country. They seemed to fancy that Clark had stilled the West, that here the cannon had ceased to rattle.

Emigrants on packhorses bound for the land of cane and turkeys saw bodies of scalped white men every day. Logan and his forest rangers, like knights of old, guarded the Wilderness Road. Kenton and his scouts patrolled the Ohio, crossing and recrossing on the track of marauding savages. Boone watched the Licking; Floyd held the Bear Grass.

Fort Nelson was done,—its walls were cannon-proof. Clark's gunboat lay on the water-front when a messenger passed the sentinel with a letter.

In the little square room that Clark called his headquarters, the envoy waited. The young commandant read and bowed his head,—was it a moment of irresolution? "Who could have brought this letter?"

"Any Indian would bring it for a pint of rum," answered a well-known voice. Pulling off a mask, Connolly stood before him.

It was as if Lord Dunmore had risen from the floor,—Connolly had been Lord Dunmore's captain commandant of all the land west of the Blue Ridge. What was he saying?

"As much boundary of land on the west bank of the Ohio as you may wish, and any title under that of a duke, if you will abandon Louisville. I am sent to you by Hamilton."

"What!" gasped Clark. "Shall I become an Arnold and give up my country? Never! Go, sir, before my people discover your identity."

Resolved to lock the secret in his own heart, Clark spoke to no one. But that same night a similar offer was made to John Floyd on the Bear Grass. He mentioned it to Clark.

"We must never tell the men," they agreed; "starving and discouraged they might grasp the offer to escape the Indian tomahawk." But years after Clark told his sister Lucy, and Floyd told his wife, Jane Buchanan,—and from them the tale came down to us.

As if enraged at this refusal, British and Indians rallied for a final onslaught.

"The white men are taking the fair Kain-tuck-ee, the land of deer and buffalo. If you beat Clark this time you will certainly recover your hunting-grounds," said De Peyster at the council fire.

In unprecedented numbers the redmen crossed the Ohio,—station after station was invested; then followed the frightful battle of Blue Licks where sixty white men fell in ten minutes. Kentucky was shrouded in mourning.

Again Clark followed swift with a thousand mounted riflemen.

Among the Indians dividing their spoils and their captives there sounded a sharp alarm, "The Long Knives! The Long Knives!"

"A mighty army on its march!"

Barely had the Shawnees time to fly when Clark's famished Kentuckians entered Old Chillicothe. Fires were yet burning, corn was on the roasting sticks, but the foe was gone.

"The property destroyed was of great amount, and the quantity of provisions burned surpassed all idea we had of the Indian stores," Clark said in after years.

This second destruction of their villages and cornfields chilled the heart of the Indians. Their power was broken. Never again did a great army cross the Ohio.

But standing again on the ruins of Old Chillicothe, "I swear vengeance!" cried the young Tecumseh.

And Clark, the Long Knife, mourned in his heart.

"This might have been avoided! this might have been avoided! Never shall we have peace on this frontier until Detroit is taken!"

XIX EXIT CORNWALLIS

"The boy cannot escape me!"

Lafayette was all that lay between Cornwallis and the subjugation of Virginia. The lithe little Frenchman, only twenty-three years old, danced ever on and on before him, fatiguing the redcoats far into the heats of June.

The Virginia Legislature adjourned to Charlottesville. In vain Cornwallis chased the boy and sent Tarleton on his raid over the mountains, "to capture the Governor."

Like a flash he came, the handsome, daring, dashing Colonel Tarleton, whose name has been execrated for a hundred years.

Virginia was swept as by a tornado. Never a noise in the night, never a wind could whistle by, but "Tarleton's troop is coming!"

"Tarleton's troop!" Little John Randolph, a boy of eight, his mother then lying in childbed, was gathered up and hurried away ninety miles up the Appomattox.

"Tarleton's troop!" Beside the dead body of her husband sat the mother of four-year-old Henry Clay, with her seven small children shuddering around her. Standing on a rock in the South Anna River, the great preacher had addressed his congregation in impassioned oratory for the last time, and now on a bier he lay lifeless, while the gay trooper raided the lands of his children.

Even Tarleton was moved by the widow's pallor as he tossed a handful of coins on her table. She arose and swept them into the fireplace,—"Never will I touch the invaders' gold."

"Tarleton's troop!" Back at Waxhaw, South Carolina, a lad by the name of Andrew Jackson bore through life the scars of wounds inflicted by Tarleton's men. At that very hour, alone on foot his mother was returning from deeds of mercy to the patriots caged in prison pens by Tarleton. But the streams were cold, the forests dark; losing her way, overworn and weary, sank and died the mother of Andrew Jackson.

"Tarleton's troop!" Jack Jouett at the Cuckoo Tavern at Louisa saw white uniforms faced with green, and fluttering plumes, and shining helmets riding by.

The fiery Huguenot blood rose in him. Before daylight Jack's hard-ridden steed reined up at Monticello.

"Tarleton's troop, three hours behind me! Fly!"

There was panic and scramble,—some of the legislators were at Monticello. There was hasty adjournment and flight to Staunton, across the Blue Ridge.

Assisting his wife, the slender, graceful Mrs. Jefferson, into a carriage, the Governor sent her and the children under the care of Jupiter, the coachman, to a neighbouring farmhouse, while he gathered up his State papers.

"What next, massa?" Martin, the faithful body-servant, watching his master's glance and anticipating every want, followed from room to room.

"The plate, Martin," with a wave of the hand Jefferson strode out from his beloved Monticello.

With Cæsar's help Martin pulled up the planks of the portico, and the last piece of silver went under the floor as a gleaming helmet hove in sight. Dropping the plank, imprisoning poor Cæsar, Martin faced the intruder.

"Where is your master? Name the spot or I'll fire!"

"Fire away, then," answered the slave. The trooper desisted.

Tarleton and his men took food and drink, but destroyed nothing. The fame of Jefferson's kindness to Burgoyne's captured army had reached even Tarleton, for in that mansion books and music had been free to the imprisoned British officers.

"An' now who be ye, an' whar are ye from?"

An old woman peered from the door of a hut in a gorge of the hills, late in the afternoon.

"We are members of the Virginia Legislature fleeing from Tarleton's raid."

"Ride on, then, ye cowardly knaves! Here my husband and sons have just gone to Charlottesville to fight for ye, an' ye a runnin' awa' wi' all yer might. Clar out; ye get naething here."

"But, my good woman, it would never do to let the British capture the Legislature."

"If Patterick Hennery had been in Albemarle, the British dragoons would naever ha' passed the Rivanna."

"But, my good woman, here is Patrick Henry."

"Patterick Hennery? Patterick Hennery? Well, well, if Patterick Hennery is here it must be all right. Coom in, coom in to the best I have."

But Daniel Boone and three or four others were captured, and carried away to Cornwallis to be released soon after on parole.

"Tarleton's troop!" cried little Meriwether Lewis, seven years old.

Sweeping down the Rivanna came the desperado to the home of Colonel Nicholas Lewis, away in the Continental army.

"What a paradise!" exclaimed Tarleton, raising his hands.

"Why, then, do you interrupt it?" inquired Mrs. Lewis, alone at home with her small children and slaves.

The trooper slept that night in his horseman's cloak on the kitchen floor. At daylight Mrs. Lewis was awakened by a clatter in her henyard. Ducks, chickens, turkeys, the troopers were wringing their necks. One decrepit old drake only escaped by skurrying under the barn.

Bowing low till his plume swept the horse's mane, Tarleton galloped away.

The wrath of Aunt Molly! "Here, Pompey, you just catch that drake. Ride as fast as you can, and present it to Colonel Tarleton with my compliments."

On flying steed, drake squawking and flouncing on his back, the darkey flew after the troopers.

"Well, Pompey, did you overtake Colonel Tarleton?" was Aunt Molly's wrathful inquiry.

"Yes'm."

"What did he say?"

"He put de drake in his wallet, and say he much obleeged!"

Little Meriwether, sitting on the gate-post, laughed at his aunt's discomfiture.

The roll of a drum broke the stillness of Sabbath in the Blue Ridge.

"Tarleton's troop!" By the bed of her sick husband sat a Spartan mother at Staunton. Her sons were in the army at the north, but three young lads, thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen were there.

Placing their father's old firelock in their hands, "Go forth, my children," she said, "repel the foot of the invader or see my face no more."

But Tarleton did not force the mountain pass,—the boys went on down to join Lafayette.

From farm and forest, children and grandsires hurried to Lafayette. The proud earl retired to the sea and stopped to rest at the little peninsula of Yorktown, waiting for reinforcements.

Down suddenly from the north came Washington with his tattered Continentals and Rochambeau's gay Frenchmen, and the French fleet sailed into the Chesapeake. Cornwallis was bottled up at Yorktown.

The boy, Lafayette, had simply put the stopper in the bottle and waited.

Seventy cannon rolled in on Yorktown. George Rogers Clark, all the West, was appealing to Washington, but the great chief unmoved kept his eye on Lord Cornwallis.

On the 19th of October, 1781, the aristocratic marquis, who had commenced his career as aide-de-camp to a king, surrendered to the rebels of America.

"'Wallis has surrendered! surrendered! surrendered!"

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark flung up their caps with other boys and shouted with the best of them, "'Wallis has surrendered!"

After the surrender of Cornwallis, Washington and Lafayette and the officers of the French and American armies went to Fredericksburg to pay their respects to Mary, the mother of Washington. The entire surrounding country was watching in gala attire, and among them the old cavalier, John Clark of Caroline.

On his white horse Washington passed the mulberry trees. Quick as a flash little William turned,—"Why, father, he does look like my brother George! Is that why people call our George the 'Washington of the West'?"

A provisional treaty was signed at Paris, November 30, 1782, a few days after the return of George Rogers Clark from that last Chillicothe raid. Slowly, by pack-horse and flatboat, the news reached Kentucky.

The last of the British army sailed away. Washington made his immortal farewell, and went back to his farm, arriving on Christmas Eve. Bonfires and rockets, speeches, thanksgiving and turkey, ended the year 1782.

But with his return from the last scene at Yorktown, the father of Meriwether Lewis lay down and died, a martyr of the Revolution.

XX THE OLD VIRGINIA HOME

Back over Boone's trace, the Wilderness Road he had travelled so many times, went General George Rogers Clark sometime in the early Spring of 1783, past the thrifty fields of Fincastle and the Shenandoah Germans, with their fat cattle and huge red barns. Every year the stout Pennsylvanians were building farther and farther up. Year by year the fields increased, and rosy girls stacked the hay in defiance of all Virginian customs across the Ridge.

But the man who a thousand miles to the west held Illinois by the prowess of his arm and the terror of his name, sprang not with the buoyant step of six years before when he had gone to Virginia after the gunpowder. His thoughts were at Kaskaskia, Vincennes, Louisville, where his unsustained garrisons were suffering for food and clothing.

"Peace, peace, peace!" he muttered. "'Tis but a mockery. Must Kentucky lie still and be scalped?"

Still the savages raided the border, not in numbers, but in squads, persistent and elusive. Isham Floyd, the boy drummer of Vincennes, had been captured by the savages and three days tortured in the woods, and burnt at the stake.

"My boy-brother in the hands of those monsters?" exclaimed the great-hearted John Floyd of the Bear Grass. A word roused the country, the savages were dispersed, but poor Isham was dead. And beside him lay his last tormentor, the son of an Indian chief, shot by the avenging rifle of John Floyd.

Riding home with a heavy heart on the 12th of April, a ball struck Colonel Floyd, passed through his arm, and entered his breast. Behind the trees they caught a glimpse of the smoking rifle of Big Foot, that chief whose son was slain. Leaping from his own horse to that of his brother, Charles Floyd sustained the drooping form until they reached the Bear Grass.

"Charles," whispered the dying man, "had I been riding Pompey this would not have happened. Pompey pricks his ears and almost speaks if a foe is near."

At the feet of Jane Buchanan her brave young husband was laid, his black locks already damp with the dew of death.

"Papa! Papa!" Little two-year-old George Rogers Clark Floyd screamed with terror. Ten days later the stricken wife, Jane Buchanan, gave birth to another son, whom they named in honour of his heroic father.

With such a grief upon him, General George Rogers Clark wended his lonesome way through the Cumberland Gap to Virginia. Now in the night-time he heard young Isham cry. Not a heart in Kentucky but bewailed the fate of the drummer boy. And John Floyd, his loss was a public calamity.

"John Floyd, John Floyd," murmured Clark on his lonely way, "the encourager of my earliest adventures, truest heart of the West!"

Lochry's men haunted him while he slept. "Had I not written they would not have come!"

His debts, dishonoured, weighed like a pall, and deep, deep, down in his heart he knew at last how much he loved that girl in the convent at New Orleans. At times an almost ungovernable yearning came over him to go down and force the gates of her voluntary prison-house.

In May he was at Richmond. A new Governor sat in the chair of Jefferson and Patrick Henry. To him Clark addressed an appeal for the money that was his due.

But Virginia, bankrupt, impoverished, prostrate, answered only,—"We have given you land warrants, what more can you ask?"

With heavy heart Clark travelled again the road to Caroline.

There was joy in the old Virginia home, and sorrow. Once more the family were reunited. First came Colonel Jonathan, with his courtly and elegant army comrade Major William Croghan, an Irish gentleman, nephew of Sir William Johnson, late Governor of New York, and of the famous George Croghan, Sir William's Indian Deputy in the West.

In fact young Croghan crossed the ocean with Sir William as his private secretary, on the high road to preferment in the British army. But he looked on the struggling colonists, and mused,—

"Their cause is just! I will raise a regiment for Washington."

While all his relatives fought for the King, he alone froze and starved at Valley Forge, and in that frightful winter of 1780 marched with Jonathan Clark's regiment to the relief of Charleston. And Charleston fell.

"Restore your loyalty to Great Britain and I will set you free," said Major General Prevost, another one of Croghan's uncles.

"I cannot," replied the young rebel. "I have linked my fate with the colonies."

Nevertheless General Prevost released him and his Colonel, Jonathan Clark, on parole. Lieutenant Edmund was held a year longer.

Directly to the home in Caroline, Colonel Jonathan brought his Irish Major. And there he met—Lucy.

Then, with the exchange of prisoners, Edmund came, damaged it is true, but whole, and John, John from the prison ships, ruined.

At sight of the emaciated face of her once handsome boy, the mother turned away and wept. Five long years in the prison ship had done its work. Five years, where every day at dawn the dead were brought out in cartloads. Stifled in crowded holds and poisoned with loathsome food, in one prison ship alone in eighteen months eleven thousand died and were buried on the Brooklyn shore. And then came the General, George Rogers, and Captain Richard, from the garrison of Kaskaskia where he had helped to hold the Illinois.

In tattered regimentals and worn old shirts they came,—the army of the Revolution was disbanded without a dollar.

"And I, worse than without a dollar," said General George Rogers. "My private property has been sacrificed to pay public debts."

But from what old treasure stores did those girls bring garments, homespun and new and woolly and warm, prepared against this day of reunion? The soldiers were children again around their father's hearth, with mother's socks upon their feet and sister's arms around their necks.

Jonathan, famous for his songs, broke forth in a favourite refrain from Robin Hood:—

"And you call us lily flowers?" cried Fanny, the beauty and the pet. "The lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin; and here have we been spinning for weeks and weeks to dress you boys again."

"And what has William been doing?"

"Learning to follow in the footsteps of my brothers," answered the lad of thirteen. "Another year and I, too, could have gone as a drummer boy."

"Thank God, you'll never have to," ejaculated the General solemnly.

The old house rang with merriment as it had not in years. The negroes, York and old York and Rose his wife, Jane and Julia and Cupid and Harry, and Nancy the cook, were jubilantly preparing a feast for welcome.

Other guests were there,—Colonel Anderson, aide-de-camp of Lafayette, who was to wed Elizabeth, the sister next older than William; and Charles Mynn Thruston, son of the "Fighting Parson," and Dennis Fitzhugh, daft lovers of the romping Fanny.

Since before the Revolution Jonathan had been engaged to Sarah Hite, the daughter of Joist Hite, first settler of the Shenandoah. Thousands of acres had her father and hundreds of indentured white servants. Joist Hite's claim overlay that of Lord Fairfax; they fought each other in the courts for fifty years. Should Hite win, Sarah would be the greatest heiress in Virginia.

From the sight of happy courtship George Rogers turned and ever and anon talked with his parents, "solemn as the judgment," said Fanny.

A few blissful days and the time for scattering came. Again the old broad-porticoed farmhouse was filled with farewells,—negro slaves held horses saddled.

"But we shall meet in Kentucky," said old John Clark the Cavalier.

George Rogers bade them good-bye, waved a last kiss back, whipped up his horse, and entered the forest.

In October John died. A vast concourse gathered under the mulberry trees where the young Lieutenant lay wrapped in the flag of his country, a victim of the prison ship. Great was the indignation of friends as they laid him away.

And now preparations were rapidly carried forward for removal to Kentucky.

XXI DOWN THE OHIO

There was truce on the border. The wondering redmen heard that the great King had withdrawn across the Big Water and that the Long Knives were victors in the country.

With wondering minds Shawnee and Delaware, Wyandot and Miami, discussed around their council fires the changed situation. Very great had the redcoats appeared in the eyes of the savages, with their dazzling uniforms, and long, bright, flashing swords. But how terrible were the Virginians of the Big Knives!

The continental armies had been dispersed, but now from their old war-ravaged homes of the Atlantic shore they looked to the new lands beyond the Alleghanies. Congress would pay them in these lands, and so the scarred veterans of a hundred battles launched on the emigrant trail.

In the Clark home there was busy preparation. Out of attic and cellar old cedar chests were brought and packed with the precious linen, fruit of many a day at the loom. Silver and pewter and mahogany bureaus, high-post bedsteads and carved mirrors, were carefully piled in the waggons as John Clark, cavalier, turned his face from tidewater Virginia.

Neighbours called in to bid them farewell. Mrs. Clark made a last prayer at the grave of her son, the victim of the prison ship.

"William, have you brought the mulberry cuttings?" called the motherly Lucy.

"William, have you the catalpa seeds?" cried Fanny.

Leaving the old home with Jonathan to be sold, the train started out,—horses, cattle, slaves, York riding proudly at the side of his young master William, old York and Rose, Nancy, Jane, Julia, Cupid and Harry and their children, a patriarchal caravan like that of Abraham facing an earlier west two thousand years before.

Before and behind were other caravans. All Virginia seemed on the move, some by Rockfish Gap and Staunton, up the great valley of Virginia to the Wilderness Road, on packhorses; others in waggons, like the Clarks, following the Braddock route down to Redstone-Old-Fort on the Monongahela, where boats must be built.

And here at Redstone was George Rogers Clark, come up to meet them from the Falls. In short order, under his direction, boatbuilders were busy. York and old York took a hand, and William, in a first experience that was yet to find play in the far Idaho.

The teasing Fanny looked out from her piquant sun-bonnet. Lucy, more sedate, was accompanied by her betrothed, Major Croghan.

"My uncle, George Croghan, has lately died in New York and left me his heir. I shall locate in Louisville," was the Major's explanation to his friend's inquiry.

"And what is the news from Virginia?"

"Your old friend Patrick Henry is Governor again. Jonathan visited him last week," was William's reply.

"And Jonathan's wife, Sarah Hite, bids fair to secure her fortune," added Fanny. "You see, when old Lord Fairfax heard of Cornwallis's surrender he gave up. 'Put me to bed, Jo,' he said, 'it is time for me to die,' and die he did. Now his lands are in the courts."

"Mrs. Jefferson, who was ill, died as a result of the excitement of the flight from Tarleton," said Lucy. "To get away from his sorrow, Mr. Jefferson has accepted the appointment of minister to France to succeed Dr. Franklin, and has taken Martha and Maria with him. They will go to school in Paris."

George Rogers Clark was a silent man. He spoke no word of his recent trip to Philadelphia, in which Dr. Franklin had grasped his hand and said, "Young man, you have given an empire to the Republic."

"General Washington has just returned from a horseback journey down into this country," added Major Croghan. "He has lands on the Ohio."

"And have you no word of yourself or of Kentucky?"

General Clark handed his father a notification from the Assembly of Virginia. He read it aloud.

"The conclusion of the war, and the distressed situation of the State with respect to its finances, call on us to adopt the most prudent economy. You will, therefore, consider yourself out of command."

"And you are no longer in the army?"

"No, nor even on a footing with the Continentals. I was simply a soldier of the Virginia militia, and, as such, have no claim even for the half pay allotted to all Continental officers."

"But Virginia has ceded her western territories to Congress with the distinct stipulation that expenses incurred in subduing any British posts therein, or in acquiring any part of the territory, shall be reimbursed by the United States."

"Is there any hope there? What has Congress? An empty treasury. And who is to pay the bills incurred in the Illinois conquest? Shall I, a private individual?"

"That would be impossible," commented the father.

"But I am not disheartened," continued George Rogers. "When the Indians are quiet, my men hope to build a city on the land granted us opposite the Falls. And here is something from Jefferson, written before he left for Europe."

William stood attentive while the letter was read.

Annapolis, December 4, 1783.

Dear Sir,—I find they have subscribed a very large sum of money in England for exploring the country from the Mississippi to California. They pretend it is only to promote knowledge. I am afraid they have thought of colonising into that quarter. Some of us have been talking here in a feeble way of making an attempt to search that country, but I doubt whether we have enough of that kind of spirit to raise the money. How would you like to lead such a party? Though I am afraid our prospect is not worth the question.

Your friend and humble servant, Thomas Jefferson."

"Does he want you to lead an exploring party to the Pacific Ocean?" inquired William with intense interest.

"That is the substance of it. And I should want you to accompany me."

Little did either then dream that William Clark would lead that party, with another.

The boats were ready. Surmounted by the Stars and Stripes of the "old thirteen" they started on their journey. Suddenly the Monongahela closed with ice and locked them at Pittsburg, where flurries of snow set the sleigh-bells ringing.

Through deep drifts, under the guns of Fort Pitt, files of Philadelphia traders were buying up skins and tallow, to carry back over the mountains in their packsaddles that had come out loaded with salt and gunpowder. Squaws were exchanging peltries for the white man's tea and sugar. A great concourse of emigrants was blocked for the winter. Every cabin was crowded.

After great exertions George had secured quarters quite unlike the roomy old Virginian home.

"I must be gone to make peace with those Indians who have been acting with the British, and take steps toward securing titles beyond the Ohio."

Accompanied by two other commissioners, General Clark set out for Fort McIntosh. It was January before the Indians gathered with Pierre Drouillard, interpreter now for the United States.

"By the treaty of peace with England this land belongs to the Thirteen Fires," was the basis of argument. "You have been allies of England, and now by the law of nations the land is ours."

"No! No!" fiercely cried Buckongahelas.

"But we will divide with you. You are to release your white captives, and give up a part of your Ohio lands. The rest you can keep. Detroit and Michilimackinac belong to the Thirteen Fires." Then boundaries were drawn.

"No! No!" cried Buckongahelas. Clark heeded not.

After deliberation the chiefs signed,—Wyandot, Ottawa, Chippewa,—all but Buckongahelas. "I am a friend of Great Britain!" roared the Delaware King. Then to the surprise of all, suddenly striding past the other commissioners, the swarthy chief took the hand of General Clark. "I thank the Great Spirit for having this day brought together two such warriors as Buckongahelas and the Long Knife." Clark smiled and returned the compliment.

"Will the gorge break?" every frontiersman was asking when George returned to Pittsburg.

Piled back for seventy miles the Alleghany was a range of ice, heaped floe on floe. Where the muddy Monongahela blends with the crystal Alleghany the boats lay locked with a hundred others, awaiting the deluge.

Suddenly the melting snows of the Alleghanies burst; the ice loosened, tearing and cutting the branches of trees overhanging the river; and slowly, with the ice, moved the great fleet of flatboats.

Ever narrower and deeper and swifter, the Ohio leaped with tremendous rush down its confined channel. The trees on the uninhabited shores, never yet cut away, held the embankment firm, and racing down on the perilous flood came the Clarks to the Falls of the Ohio, in March of 1785.

Fascinated by the rush of waves, fourteen-year-old William poled like a man. Could he dream what destruction lay in their course? "L'année des grandes eaux," 1785, is famous in the annals of the West as the year of great waters. The floods came down and drowned out old Ste. Genevieve and drove the inhabitants back to the higher terrace on which that village stands to-day. Above, the whole American Bottom was a swift running sea, Kaskaskia and Cahokia were submerged by the simultaneous melting of the snows, and nothing but its high bold shore of limestone rock saved St. Louis itself. Paddling around in his boat, Auguste Chouteau ate breakfast on the roofs of Ste. Genevieve.

At Louisville barely could boats be pulled in to the Bear Grass. Below, waves foamed and whirled among the rocks, that to-day have been smoothed by the hand of man into a shallow channel.

Guided by skilful hands, many a trader's boat that year took the chute of the Falls like an arrow; over the ledges that dammed the water back, down, down they slid out of sight into that unknown West, where William knew not that his brother had paved the way to Louisiana.

"Have you found us a tract?" inquired the anxious mother.

"Land, mother? I own a dukedom, my soldiers and I, one hundred and fifty thousand acres, on the Indian side of the river. We have incorporated a town there, Clarksville they call it. It will be a great city,—but Louisville is safer at present."

That Spring they lived at Fort Nelson, with watchmen on the ramparts.

"But we saw no Indians in coming down!"

"True enough, the flood was a surprise so early in the year. Wait a little, and you will hear more of this terrifying river-route, where in low water it takes seven weeks to run from Redstone to the Bear Grass. Then the murderous clutches of the Indians have free play among the helpless emigrants. Let us be thankful for what you escaped."

Almost while they were speaking a band of Indians glided out of the woods not far away, snatched a boy from a fence, and shot his father in the field.

"Don't kill me, just take me prisoner," said little Tommy, looking up into the warrior's face.

At that instant an elder brother's rifle felled the Indian, and the boy was saved to become the father of Abraham Lincoln.

XXII MULBERRY HILL

On a beautiful eminence three miles south of Louisville, John Clark built his pioneer Kentucky home. Louisville itself consisted of but a few log cabins around a fortification built by George Rogers Clark.

This family home, so far from the centre, was stockaded by itself, a double log house, two and a half stories high, with hall through the middle.

Every night a negro stood sentinel, there were portholes in the pickets, and Indians hid in the canebrakes. Once while the young ladies were out walking an Indian shot a little negro girl and they carried her back wounded, behind the pickets at Mulberry Hill.

The floor of the long dining-room was of wood, hard as a bone, and over the seven-foot mantel stag-horns and swords of the Revolution were lit by the light of the cavernous fireplace.

Rigid economy and untiring industry had been the rule at the old Clark home in Caroline, and not less was it here. There were no pianos, but until midnight the hum of the wheel made music.

Enchanted the young people listened to tale and song and hum of wheel, while down the great chimney top calmly smiled the pensive stars.

Little thought they of bare walls, low rafters, or small windows. After the boys hauled in the logs on a hand-sled, and built up a great flame, the whole world seemed illuminated. The pewter basins shone like mirrors, and while their fingers flew in the light of the fire, stories were told of Kaskaskia, Vincennes, St. Louis. But the Donna? Clark never spoke of her. It was a hidden grief that made him ever lonely. When he saw the lovelight all around him and sometimes left the room, the mother wondered why sudden silence came upon the group.

At Mulberry Hill Lucy was married to Major Croghan, who, on a farm five miles out, built Locust Grove, an English mansion of the olden style, in its day the handsomest in Louisville. And Fanny? She was the belle of Kentucky. In powdered wig and ruffles many a grave Virginian tripped with her the minuet and contra dances of the Revolution.

More and more young William became enamoured of the Indian dress, and went about gaily singing the songs of Robin Hood and hacking the meat with his hunting knife.

Out over the game-trails of Kentucky, like the beaten streets of Fredericksburg, the only city he ever knew, young William went with the Boones, Kenton, and his own famous brother, George Rogers Clark, in peltry cap and buckskin hunting-shirt girded with a leathern belt.

Led by them, with what eagerness he shot his first buffalo, deep in the woods of Kentucky. Not much longer could bears, deer, and buffalo retreat to the cane. With the coming of the Clarks an emigration set in that was to last for a hundred years.

Even amusements partook of sportive adventure. Now it was the hunter's horn summoning the neighbours to a bear chase in the adjoining hills. William surpassed the Indian himself in imitating the bark of the wolf, the hoot of the owl, the whistle of the whippoorwill.

Daniel Boone came often to Mulberry Hill in leggings and moccasins, ever hunting, hunting, hunting beaver, bear and coon, wolves and wild-cats, deer and foxes, and going back to trade their skins in Maryland for frontier furniture, knives and buttons, scissors, nails, and tea.

Upon his shot-pouch strap Boone fastened his moccasin awl with a buckhorn handle made out of an old clasp-knife, and carried along with him a roll of buckskin to mend his mocassins. While the grizzled hunter stitched deftly at his moccasins, William and York sat by, engaged in the same pastime, for wherever William went, York was his shadow.

"Since poor Richard's uncertain fate I can never trust the boy alone," said his mother. "York, it is your business to guard your young master." And he did, to the ends of the earth.

When "Uncle Daniel," rolled in a blanket, threw himself down on a bed of leaves and slept with his feet to the fire to prevent rheumatism, York and William lay down too, sleeping by turns and listening for Indians.

At daylight, loosely belting their fringed hunting shirts into wallets for carrying bread, a chunk of jerked beef, or tow for the gun, with tomahawk on the right side and scalping knife on the left, each in a leathern case, again they set off under the reddening forest.

Skilled in the lore of woodcraft, watchful of clouds and stars and sun, an intimate student of insect life and own brother to the wily beaver, bear, and buffalo, William Clark was becoming a scientist.

Returning from the chase with the same sort of game that graced the Saxon board before the Norman conquest, he sat down to hear the talk of statesmen. For when Clark's commission was revoked, Kentucky, unprotected, called a convention to form a State.

Affairs that in European lands are left to kings and their ministers, were discussed in the firelight of every cabin. Public safety demanded action. Exposed on three sides to savage inroads, with their Virginia capital hundreds of miles beyond forest, mountains, and rivers, no wonder Kentucky pleaded for statehood.

In a despotic country the people sleep. Here every nerve was awake. Discussion, discussion, discussion, made every fireside a school of politics; even boys in buckskin considered the nation's welfare.

Before he was seventeen William Clark was made an ensign and proudly donned the eagle and blue ribbon of the Cincinnati, a society of the soldiers of the Revolution of which Washington himself was president. Educated in the backwoods and by the cabin firelight, young William was already developing the striking bearing and bold unwavering character of his brother.

"What can have become of Richard?" Every day the mother heart glanced down the long avenue of catalpas that were growing in front of Mulberry Hill.

Of the whole family, the gentle affectionate Richard was an especial favourite. He was coming from Kaskaskia to see his mother, but never arrived. One day his horse and saddlebags were found on the banks of the Wabash. Was he killed by the Indians, or was he drowned? No one ever knew.

Again George Rogers Clark was out making treaties with the Indians to close up the Revolution, but British emissaries had been whispering in their ears, "Make the Ohio the boundary."

At last, after long delays, a few of the tribes came in to the council at the mouth of the Great Miami, some in friendship, some like the Shawnees, rudely suggestive of treachery.

"The war is over," explained General Clark as chairman; "we desire to live in peace with our red brethren. If such be the will of the Shawnees, let some of their wise men speak."

There was silence as they whiffed at the council pipes. Then a tall chief arose and glanced at the handful of whites and at his own three hundred along the walls of the council house.

"We come here to offer you two pieces of wampum. You know what they mean. Choose." Dropping the beaded emblems upon the table the savage turned to his seat by the wall.

Pale, calm as a statue, but with flashing eye, Clark tangled his slender cane into the belts and—flung them at the chiefs.

"Ugh!"

Every Indian was up with knife unsheathed, every white stood with hand on his sword. Into their very teeth the Long Knife had flung back the challenge, "Peace, or War."

Like hounds in leash they strained, ready to leap, when the lordly Long Knife raised his arm and grinding the wampum beneath his heel thundered,—

"Dogs, you may go!"

One moment they wavered, then broke and fled tumultuously from the council house.

All night they debated in the woods near the fort. In the morning, "Let me sign," said Buckongahelas.

Smiling, Clark guided the hand of the boastful Delaware, and all the rest signed with him.

XXIII MISSISSIPPI TROUBLES

For the first time in their stormy history, the front and rear gates of the Kentucky forts lay back on their enormous wooden hinges, and all day long men and teams passed in and out with waggon loads of grain from the harvest fields. So hushed and still was the air, it seemed the old Indian days were gone for ever. At night the animals came wandering in from the woods, making their customary way to the night pens. Fields of corn waved undisturbed around the forts.

But the truce was brief. Already the Cherokees were slaughtering on the Wilderness Road, and beyond the Ohio, Shawnee and Delaware, wild at the sight of the white man's cabin, rekindled the fires around the stake.

Thousands of emigrants were coming over the mountains from Carolina, and down the Ohio from Pittsburg social boats lashed together rode in company, bark canoes, pirogues, flatboats, keelboats, scows, barges, bateaux and brigades of bateaux, sweeping down with resistless English, Scotch, Irish, Germans, Huguenots, armed for the battle of the races.

Still the powerful fur traders of Quebec and Montreal hung on to Detroit and Mackinac, still De Peyster opposed giving up the peninsulas of Michigan.

"Pen the young republic east of the Alleghanies," said France, Spain, England, when the Peace Treaty was under consideration. But Clark's conquest compelled them to grant the Illinois.

Before the ink was dry on the documents, Kentucky was trading down the great river of De Soto.

"The West must trade over the mountains," said the merchants of Philadelphia and Baltimore.

"The West will follow its rivers," answered Kentucky.

"Spain is Mistress of the Mississippi," said the Spanish King to John Jay, the American minister at Madrid.

In vain flatboatmen with wheat and corn said, "We are from Kentucky."

"What Kaintucke?" brayed the commandant at Natchez. "I know no Kaintucke. Spain own both side de river. I am ordered to seize all foreign vessel on de way to New Orleong."

Without the Spaniard the trip was sufficiently hazardous. Indians watched the shores. Pirates infested the bayous. Head winds made the frail craft unmanageable,—snags leered up like monsters to pierce and swallow. But every new settler enlarged the fields, and out of the virgin soil the log granaries were bursting.

"Carry away our grain, bring us merchandise," was the cry of expanding Kentucky.

But to escape the Indian was to fall into the hands of the Spaniard, and the Spaniard was little more than a legalised pirate.

Even the goods of the Frenchmen were seized with the warning, "Try it again and we'll send you to Brazil."

The Frenchmen resented this infringement on their immemorial right. Since the days of the daring and courageous Bienville who founded New Orleans, no man had said them nay. A tremendous hatred of the Spaniard grew up in the hearts of the Frenchmen.

In the midst of these confiscations there was distress and anarchy in the Illinois. The infant republic had not had time to stretch out there the strong arm of law. Floods and continental money had ruined the confiding Frenchmen; the garrisons were in destitution; they were writing to Clark:—

"Our credit is become so weak among the French that one dollar's worth of provisions cannot be had without prompt payment, were it to save the whole country."

"And why has our British Father made no provision for us," bewailed the Indians, "who at his beck and call have made such deadly enemies of the Long Knives? Our lands have been ravaged by fire and sword, and now we are left at their mercy."

"Let us drive the red rascals out," cried the infuriated settlers.

"No," said Washington, who understood and pitied the red men. "Forgive the past. Dispossess them gradually by purchase as the extension of settlement demands the occupation of their lands."

But five thousand impoverished Indians in the Ohio country kept thirty thousand settlers in hot water all the time. No lock on a barn door could save the horses, no precaution save the outlying emigrant from scalping or capture. Red banditti haunted the streams and forests, dragging away their screaming victims like ogres of mediæval tragedy.

Clark grew sick and aged over it. "No commission, no money, no right to do anything for my suffering country!"

"Your brother, the General, is very ill," said old John Clark, coming out of the sick chamber at Mulberry Hill. In days to come there were generals and generals in the Clark family, but George Rogers was always "the General."

Into ten years the youthful commander had compressed the exposure of a lifetime. Mental anguish and days in the icy Wabash told now on his robust frame, and inflammatory rheumatism set in from which he never recovered.

"The Americans are your enemies," emissaries from Detroit were whispering at Vincennes. "The Government has forsaken you. They take your property, they pay nothing."

"We have nothing to do with the United States," said the French citizens, weary of a Congress that heeded them not. "We consider ourselves British subjects and shall obey no other power."

Even Clark's old friend, The Tobacco's Son, had gone back to his British father, and as always with Indians, dug up the red tomahawk.

A committee of American citizens at Vincennes sent a flying express to Clark.

"This place that once trembled at your victorious arms, and these savages overawed by your superior power, is now entirely anarchical and we shudder at the daily expectation of horrid murder. We beg you will write us by the earliest opportunity. Knowing you to be a friend of the distressed we look to you for assistance."

Such a call could not be ignored. Kentucky was aroused and summoned her favourite General to the head of her army. From a sick bed he arose to lead a thousand undisciplined men, and with him went his brother William.

The sultry sun scorched, the waters were low, provisions did not arrive until nine days after the soldiers, and then were spoiled. Fatigued, hungry, three hundred revolted and left; nevertheless, the Indians had fled and Vincennes was recovered.

Just then up the Wabash came a Spaniard with a boatload of valuable goods. Clark promptly confiscated the cargo, and out of them paid his destitute troops.

"It is not alone retaliation," said Clark, "It is a warning. If Spain will not let us trade down the river, she shall not trade up."

Kentucky applauded. They even talked of sending Clark against the Spaniards and of breaking away from a government that refused to aid them.

"General Clark seized Spanish goods?" Virginia was alarmed and promptly repudiated the seizure. "We are not ready to fight Spain."

Clark's friends were disturbed. "You will be hung."

Clark laughed. "I will flee to the Indians first."

"We have as much to fear from the turbulence of our backwoodsmen," said Washington, "as from the hostility of the Spaniards."

But at this very time, unknown to Washington, the Spaniards were arming the savages of the south, to exterminate these reckless ambitious frontiersmen.

Louisiana feared these unruly neighbours. Intriguers from New Orleans were whispering, "Break with the Atlantic States and league yourself with Spain."

Then came the rumour, "Jay proposes to shut up the Mississippi for twenty-five years!"

Never country was in such a tumult.

"We are sold! We are vassals of Spain!" cried the men of the West. "What? Close the Mississippi for twenty-five years as a price of commercial advantage on the Atlantic coast? Twenty-five years when our grain is rotting? Twenty-five years must we be cut off when the Wilderness Road is thronged with packtrains, when the Ohio is black with flatboats? Where do they think we are going to pen our people? Where do they think we are going to ship our produce? Better put twenty thousand men in the field at once and protect our own interests."

The bond was brittle; how easily might it be broken!

Even Spain laughed at the weakness of a Union that could not command Kentucky to give up its river. And Kentucky looked to Clark. "We must conquer Spain or unite with her. We must have the Mississippi. Will you march with us on New Orleans?"

Then, happily, Virginia spoke out for the West. "We must aid them. The free navigation of the Mississippi is the gift of nature to the United States."

The very next day Madison announced in the Virginia Assembly, "I shall move the election of delegates to a Constitutional Convention." The stability of the Union seemed pivoted upon an open river to the Gulf.

Veterans of the Revolution and of the Continental Congress met to frame a constitution in 1787. After weeks of deliberation with closed doors, the immortal Congress adjourned. The Constitution was second only to the Declaration of Independence. Without kings or princes a free people had erected a Continental Republic.

The Constitution was adopted, and all the way into Kentucky wilds were heard the roaring of cannon and ringing of bells that proclaimed the Father of his Country the first President of the United States.

"We must cement the East and the West," said Washington. But that West was drifting away—with its Mississippi.

About this time young Daniel Boone said, "Father, I am going west."

Just eighteen, one year older than William Clark, in the summer of 1787, he concluded to strike out for the Mississippi.

"Well, Dannie boy, thee take the compass," said his father.

It was the old guide, as large as a saucer, that Lord Dunmore gave Boone when he sent him out to call in the surveyors from the Falls of the Ohio thirteen years before.

Mounted on his pony, with a wallet of corn and a rifle on his back, Boone rode straight on westward thirty days without meeting a single human being. Pausing on the river bank opposite St. Louis he hallooed for an hour before any one heard him.

"Dat some person on de oder shore," presently said old René Kiercereaux, the chorister at the village church.

A canoe was sent over and brought back Boone. As if a man had dropped from the moon, French, Spanish, and Indian traders gathered. He spoke not a word of French, but Auguste Chouteau's slave Petrie could talk English.

"Son of Boone, de great hunter? Come to my house!"

"Come to my house!"

The hospitable Creoles strove with one another for the honour of entertaining the son of Daniel Boone. For twelve years he spent his summers in St. Louis and his winters in western Missouri, hunting and trapping.

"The best beaver country on earth," he wrote to his father. "You had better come out."

"Eef your father, ze great Colonel Boone, will remove to Louisiana," said Señor Zenon Trudeau, the Lieutenant-Governor, "eef he will become a citizen of Spain, de King will appreciate de act and reward him handsomely."

XXIV ST. CLAIR

"Kentucky! Kentucky! I hear nothing else," exclaimed the Fighting Parson of the Revolution, who had thrown aside his prayer-book and gown to follow the armies of Washington. "If this western exodus continues Virginia bids fair to be depopulated." Even Jack Jouett, who had ridden to warn Jefferson of Tarleton's raid, had gone to become an honoured member of Kentucky's first legislature.

"Father, let me go."

Charles Mynn Thruston, the son of the Fighting Parson, had long desired to follow Fanny Clark, but his father held him back. Smiling now at the ardour of his son, he said, "You may go, my boy. I am thinking of the western country myself."

Preparations were immediately made, business affairs settled, and a farewell dinner brought friends to historic Mount Zion, the famous Shenandoah seat of the Fighting Parson.

"A strangah desiahs to know, sah, if he can get dinnah, sah," announced black Sambo.

"Certainly, certainly." Parson Thruston was the soul of hospitality. "Bring him at once to the table, Sambo."

The stranger seated himself and ate in silence.

"I perceive," remarked the Parson after the courses had been removed, "I perceive that you are a traveller. May I inquire whence you come?"

Every ear was intent. "From Kentucky, sir," answered the stranger.

"Ah, that is fortunate. I am about to leave for that country myself," exclaimed young Thruston, "and shall be glad to hear such news as you may have to communicate."

The stranger smiled and pondered. "The only interesting incident that I recall before my departure from Louisville, was the marriage of the Kentucky belle, Miss Fanny Clark, to Dr. O'Fallon."

As if struck by a bolt from heaven, Charles Mynn Thruston fell unconscious to the floor.

Dr. O'Fallon was a young Irish gentleman of talent and learning. An intimate friend of the Governor of South Carolina, just before the Revolution he had come to visit America, but espousing the cause of the colonists, the Governor promptly clapped him into prison.

"Imprisoned O'Fallon!" The people of Charleston arose, liberated him, and drove the Governor to the British fleet in the harbour.

Dr. O'Fallon enlisted as a private soldier. But surgeons were needed,—he soon proved himself one of skill unexcelled in America. General Washington himself ordered him north, and made him Surgeon-General in his own army. Here he remained until the close of the war, and was thanked by Congress for his services.

And now he had visited Kentucky to assist in securing the navigation of the Mississippi, and met—Fanny. With the charming Fanny as his wife, Dr. O'Fallon rode many a mile in the woods, the first great doctor of Louisville.

Other emigrants were bringing other romances, and other tragedies. "Ohio! Ohio! We hear nothing but Ohio!" said the people of New England.

One rainy April morning the "Mayflower," a flatboat with a second Plymouth colony, turned into the Muskingum and founded a settlement.

"Marie, Marie Antoinette,—did she not use her influence in behalf of Franklin's mission to secure the acknowledgment of American independence? Let us name our settlement Marietta."

So were founded the cities of the French king and queen, Louisville and Marietta. A few months later, Kentuckians went over and started Cincinnati on the site of George Rogers Clark's old block-house.

Into the Ohio, people came suddenly and in swarms, "institutional Englishmen," bearing their household gods and shaping a state.

"These men come wearing hats," said the Indians. Frenchmen wore handkerchiefs and never tarried.

Surveyors came.

Squatting around their fires, with astonishment and fear the Indians watched "the white man's devil," squinting over his compass and making marks in his books. Wherever the magical instrument turned all the best lands were bound with chains fast to the white man.

The Indians foresaw their approaching destruction and hung nightly along the river shore, in the thick brush under the sycamores, stealing horses and sinking boats. With tomahawk in hand, a leader among them was young Tecumseh.

"The Ohio shall be the boundary. No white man shall plant corn in Ohio!" cried the Indian.

"Keep the Ohio for a fur preserve," whispered Detroit at his back.

While wedding bells were ringing at Mulberry Hill, Marietta was suffering. The gardens were destroyed by Indian marauders, the game was driven off, and great was the privation within the walled town.

That was the winter when Governor St. Clair came with his beautiful daughter Louisa, the fleetest rider in the chase, the swiftest skater on the ice, and, like all pioneer girls, so skilled with the rifle that she could bring down the bird on the wing, the squirrel from the tree.

Creeping out over the crusty February snow, every family in the settlement had its kettle in the sugar orchard boiling down the maple sap. Corn-meal and sap boiled down together formed for many the daily food.

But with all the bravado of their hearts, men and women passed sleepless vigils while the sentinel stood all night long in the lonely watchtower of the middle blockhouse. At any moment might arise the cry, "The Indians! The Indians are at the gates!" and with the long roll of the drum beating alarm every gun was ready at a porthole and every white face straining through the dark.

When screaming wild geese steering their northern flight gave token of returning spring, when the partridge drummed in the wood and the turkey gobbled, when the red bird made vocal the forest and the hawthorn and dogwood flung out their perfume, then too came the Indian from his winter lair.

"Ah," sighed many a mother, "I prefer the days of gloom and tempest, for then the red man hugs his winter fire."

Always among the first in pursuit of marauding Indians, William Clark as a cadet had already crossed the Ohio with General Scott, "a youth of solid and promising parts and as brave as Cæsar," said Dr. O'Fallon.

Joseph Brant, Thayendanegea, presented a memorial to Congress insisting upon the Ohio as the Indian boundary. His son came down to Marietta.

"Ah, yes," was the whispered rumour at Marietta, "young Brant, the educated son of the famous Mohawk leader, aspires to the hand of Louisa St. Clair." But the Revolutionary General spurned his daughter's dusky suitor.

The next day after New Year's, 1791, the Indians swept down on Marietta with the fiendish threat, "Before the trees put forth their leaves again no white man's cabin shall smoke beyond the Ohio."

"Capture St. Clair alive," bade the irate Mohawk chieftain. "Shoot his horse under him but do not kill him." Did he hope yet to win consent to his marriage with Louisa?

The next heard of St. Clair was when the last shattered remnant of his prostrate army fell back on Cincinnati, a defeat darker, more annihilating, more ominous than Braddock's.

"My God," exclaimed Washington, "it's all over! St. Clair's defeated—routed; the officers are nearly all killed, the men by wholesale; the rout is complete—too shocking to think of—and a surprise into the bargain."

No wonder Secretary Lear stood appalled as the great man poured forth his wrath in the house at Philadelphia.

Fifteen hundred went out from Cincinnati,—five hundred came back. A thousand scalps had Thayendanegea.

The news came to Mulberry Hill like a thunderbolt. Kentucky, even Pittsburg, looked for an immediate savage inundation,—for was not all that misty West full of warriors? The old fear leaped anew. Like an irresistible billow they might roll over the unprotected frontier.

From his bed of sickness General Clark started up. "Ah, Detroit! Detroit! Hadst thou been taken my countrymen need not have been so slaughtered."

At Marietta, up in the woods and on the side hills, glittered multitudes of fires, the camps of savages. Hunger added its pangs to fear. The beleaguered citizens sent all the money they could raise by two young men to buy salt, meat, and flour at Redstone-Old-Fort on the Monongahela. Suddenly the river closed with ice; in destitution Marietta waited.

"They have run off with the money," said some.

"They have been killed by Indians," said others. But again, as suddenly, the ice broke, and early in March the young men joyfully moored their precious Kentucky ark at the upper gate of the garrison at Marietta.

XXV THE SWORD OF "MAD ANTHONY" WAYNE

"Another defeat will ruin the reputation of the government," said Washington, as he sent out "Mad Anthony" Wayne, the uproarious Quaker general, with ruffles, queue, and cocked hat, the stormer of Stony Point in the Revolution.

In vain Wayne sent commissioners to treat with the Indians. Elated with recent victories, "The Ohio shall be the boundary," was the defiant answer.

An Indian captured and brought to Wayne said of the British: "All their speeches to us are red, red as blood. All the wampum and feathers are painted red. Our war-pipes and hatchets are red. Even the tobacco is red for war."

"My mind and heart are upon that river," said Cornplanter, an Indian chief, pointing to the Ohio. "May that water ever continue to be the boundary between the Americans and the Indians."

Commissioned by Washington First Lieutenant of the Fourth Sub-Legion, on the first of September, 1792, William Clark crossed the Ohio and spent the winter at Legionville where Wayne was collecting and drilling his army.

"I will have no six months men," said Wayne. "Two years will it take to organise, drill, and harden them before we think of taking the field."

"We are certain to be scalped," whispered timorous ones, remembering St. Clair's slaughter. Hundreds deserted. The very word Indian inspired terror.

But horse, foot, and artillery, he drilled them, the tremblers took courage, and the government, at last awakened, stood firmly behind with money and supplies.

"Remember, Stony Point was stormed with unloaded muskets. See! You must know the use of the broadsword and of the bayonet, a weapon before which the savages cannot stand."

At work went "Mad Anthony" teaching his men to load and fire upon the run, to leap to the charge with loud halloos, anticipating all possible conditions.

"Charge in open order. Each man rely on himself, and expect a personal encounter with the enemy." The men caught his spirit. Wayne's Legion became a great military school.

Now he was drilling superb Kentucky cavalry, as perfectly matched as the armies of Europe, sorrel and bay, chestnut and gray, bush-whacking and charging, leaping ravines and broken timber, outdoing the Indians themselves in their desperate riding.

And with all this drill, Wayne was erecting and garrisoning forts. In the fall of 1793, Lieutenant Clark was dispatched to Vincennes.

"It appears that all active and laborious commands fall on me," he wrote to his brother Jonathan, in Virginia. "Not only labour, but I like to have starved,—was frozen up in the Wabash twenty days without provisions. In this agreeable situation had once more to depend on my rifle."

After several skirmishes with Indians, Lieutenant Clark returned to Fort Washington (Cincinnati) in May, to be immediately dispatched with twenty-one dragoons and sixty cavalry to escort seven hundred packhorses laden with provisions and clothing to Greenville, a log fort eighty miles north of Cincinnati.

The Shawnees were watching. Upon this rich prize fell an ambuscade of sixty Indians. Eight men were killed, the train began to retreat, when Clark came dashing up from the rear, put the assailants to flight, and saved the day. For this he was thanked by General Wayne.

Washington, Jefferson, the whole country impatiently watched for news of Wayne on the Ohio.

Drill, drill, drill,—keeping out a cloud of scouts that no peering Indian might discover his preparations, Wayne exercised daily now with rifle, sabre, and bayonet until no grizzly frontiersman surpassed his men at the target, no fox-hunter could leap more wildly, no swordsman more surely swing the sharp steel home. At the sight young Tennesseeans and Kentuckians, Virginians of the border and Pennsylvanians of lifetime battle, were eager for the fray.

About midsummer, 1794, Wayne moved out with his Legion, twenty-six hundred strong, and halted at Fort Greenville for sixteen hundred Kentucky cavalry. Brigades of choppers were opening roads here and there to deceive.

"This General that never sleeps is cutting in every direction," whispered the watchful Shawnees. "He is the Black Snake."

For a last time Wayne offered peace. His messengers were wantonly murdered.

The issue at Fallen Timbers lasted forty minutes,—the greatest Indian battle in forty years of battle. Two thousand Indians crouching in the brush looked to see the Americans dismount and tie their horses as they did in St. Clair's battle,—but no, bending low on their horses with gleaming sabres and fixed bayonets, on like a whirlwind came thundering the American cavalry.

"What was it that defeated us? It was the Big Wind, the Tornado," said the Indians.

Matchekewis was there from Sheboygan with his warriors, the Black Partridge from Illinois, and Buckongahelas. The Shawnees had their fill of fighting that day; Tecumseh fell back at the wild onset, retreating inch by inch.

William Clark led to the charge a column of Kentuckians and drove the enemy two miles. But why enumerate in this irresistible legion, where all were heroes on that 20th of August, 1794.

Wayne's victory ended the Revolution. Ninety days after, Lord St. Helens gave up Ohio in his treaty with Jay, and England bound herself to deliver the northwestern posts that her fur traders had hung on to so vainly.