We ordinarily think of the Revolutionary War as having been fought
wholly upon the Atlantic slope. As a matter of fact, there were enacted
west of the Alleghanies, during that great struggle, deeds which proved
of immense importance to the welfare of the United States. Had it not
been for the capture from the British of the country northwest of the
Ohio River by the gallant Virginia colonel, George Rogers Clark, it is
fair to assume that the Old Northwest, as it came to be called, the
present States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin,
would to-day be a part of the Dominion of Canada.
After the brief flurry of the Pontiac conspiracy (1763), the Indians of
the Old Northwest became good friends of the British, whose aim was to
encourage the fur trade and to keep the savages good-natured. The
English have always been more successful in their treatment of Indians
than have Americans; they are more generous with them, and while not
less firm than we, they are more considerate of savage wants. The French
and the half-breeds, too, were very soon the warm supporters of British
policy, because English fur trade companies gave them abundant
employment, and evinced no desire other than to foster the primitive
conditions under which the fur trade prospered.
The English were not desirous of settling the Western wilderness with
farmers, thereby driving out the game. Our people, however, have always
been of a land-grabbing temper; we have sought to beat down the walls of
savagery, to push settlement, to cut down the forests, to plow the land,
to drive the Indian out. This meant the death of the fur trade; hence it
is small wonder that, when the Revolutionary War broke out, the French
and Indians of the Northwest upheld the British and opposed the
Americans.
A number of scattered white settlers and a few small villages had
appeared along the Ohio River and many of its southern tributaries. In
Kentucky there were several log forts, around each of which were grouped
the rude cabins of frontiersmen, who were half farmers and half hunters,
tall, stalwart fellows, as courageous as lions, and ever on the alert
for the crouching Indian foe, who came when least expected. The country
northwest of the Ohio River was then a part of the British province of
Quebec. Here and there in this Old Northwest, as we now call it, were
small villages of French and half-breed fur traders, each village
protected by a little log fort; some of these villages were garrisoned
by a handful of British soldiers, and others only by French Canadians
who were friendly to the English. Such were Vincennes, in what is now
Indiana; Kaskaskia and Cahokia, in the Illinois country; Prairie du
Chien and Green Bay, in Wisconsin; and Mackinac Island and Detroit, in
Michigan. Detroit was the headquarters, where lived the British
lieutenant governor of the Northwest, Henry Hamilton, a bold, brave,
untiring, unscrupulous man.
Hamilton's chief business was to gather about him the Indians of the
Northwest, and to excite in them hatred of the American settlers in
Kentucky. In 1777, war parties sent out by him from Detroit, under cover
of the forts of Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia, swept Kentucky from
end to end, and the whole American frontier was the scene of a frightful
panic. The American backwoodsmen were ambushed, many of the blockhouse
posts were burned, prisoners were subjected to nameless horrors, and it
seemed as if pandemonium had broken loose. By the close of the year,
such had been the rush of settlers back to their old homes, east of the
mountains, that but five or six hundred frontiersmen remained in all
Kentucky. Had the British and the Indians succeeded in driving back all
of the settlers, they would have held the whole interior of the
continent, and the American republic might never have been permitted to
grow beyond the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge; hemmed in to the
Atlantic slope, this could never have become the great nation it is
to-day.
Prominent among the defenders of Kentucky in 1777 was George Rogers
Clark. He was but twenty-five years of age, had come from a good family
in Virginia, and had a fair education for that day, but had been a wood
rover from childhood. He was tall and commanding in person, a great
hunter, and a backwoods land surveyor, such as Washington was. With
chain and compass, ax and rifle, he had, in the employ of land
speculators, wandered far and wide through the border region, knowing
its trails, its forts, its mountain passes, and its aborigines better
than he knew his books. Associated with him were Boone, Benjamin Logan,
and others who were prominent among American border heroes.
Clark saw that the best way to defend Kentucky was to strike the enemy
in their own country. Gaining permission from Patrick Henry, governor of
Virginia, for Kentucky was then but a county of Virginia, and obtaining
some small assistance in money, he raised, in 1778, a little army of a
hundred fifty backwoodsmen, clad in buckskin and homespun, who came from
the hunters' camps of the Alleghanies. The men collected at Pittsburg
and Wheeling, and in flatboats cautiously descended the Ohio to the
falls, where is now the city of Louisville. Here, on an island, they
built a fort as a military base, and the strongest of the party pushed
on down the river to the abandoned old French Fort Massac, ten miles
below the mouth of the Tennessee, from which they marched overland, for
a hundred twenty miles, to Kaskaskia in western Illinois.
Capturing Kaskaskia by surprise (July 4), and soon gaining the good will
of the French there, Clark sent out messengers who easily won over the
neighboring Cahokia; and very soon even Vincennes, on the Wabash River,
sent in its submission. It was not long before Hamilton, at Detroit,
heard the humiliating news. He at once sent out two French agents,
Charles de Langlade and Charles Gautier, of Green Bay, to raise a large
war party of Wisconsin Indians. They succeeded so well, that Hamilton
set out from Detroit in October, to retake Vincennes. His force
consisted of nearly two hundred whites (chiefly French) and three
hundred Indians. Such were the obstacles to overcome in an unbroken
wilderness, that he was seventy-one days in reaching his destination.
Clark had left but two of his soldiers at Vincennes, and as their French
allies at once surrendered, there was nothing to do but to give up the
place.
Now came one of the most stirring deeds in our Western history. Clark,
at Kaskaskia, soon learned of the loss of Vincennes; at the same time,
it was told him that the greater part of Hamilton's expedition had
disbanded for the winter, the lieutenant governor intending to launch a
still larger war party against him in the spring. Thereupon Clark
determined not to await an attack, but himself to make an attack on
Hamilton, who had remained in charge of Vincennes.
The distance across country, from Kaskaskia to Vincennes, is about two
hundred thirty miles. In summer it was a delightful region of
alternating groves and prairies; in the dead of winter, it would afford
fair traveling over the frozen plains and ice-bound rivers; but now, in
February (1779), the weather had moderated, and great freshets had
flooded the lowlands and meadows. The ground was boggy, and progress was
slow and difficult; there were no tents, and the floods had driven away
much of the game; and Clark and his officers were often taxed to their
wits' ends to devise methods for keeping their hard-worked men in good
spirits. Often they were obliged to wade in the icy water, for miles
together, and to sleep at night in soaked clothes upon little
brush-strewn hillocks, shivering with cold, and without food or fire.
But at last, after nearly three weeks of almost superhuman exertion and
indescribable misery, Vincennes was reached. The British garrison was
taken by surprise, but held out with obstinacy, and throughout the long
moonlight night the battle raged with much fury. The log fort was on the
top of a hill overlooking the little town; it was armed with several
small cannon, but Clark's men had only their muskets. They were,
however, served freely with ammunition by the French villagers; and,
being expert marksmen, could hit the gunners by firing through the
loopholes, so that by sunrise the garrison was sadly crippled. The
fight continued throughout the following morning, and in the afternoon
the British ran up the white flag. Hamilton and twenty-six of his
fellows were sent as prisoners overland to Virginia.
Clark remained as master of the Northwest until the close of the
Revolutionary War. The fact that the flag of the republic waved over
Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia when the war ended, had much to do
with the decision of the peace commissioners to allow the United States
to retain the country lying between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and
the Great Lakes.
During the Revolution, none of the forts in Wisconsin were occupied by
British soldiers, and they were allowed to tumble into decay. Wisconsin
was, however, used as a recruiting ground for Indian allies. Not only
did Langlade and Gautier raise a war party of Wisconsin Indians to help
Hamilton in his expedition against Vincennes, but they were frequently
in Wisconsin on similar business during the war. In 1779 Gautier led a
party of Wisconsin Indians to Peoria, in the Illinois country, where
there was an old French fort which, it was thought, might fall into the
hands of the Americans. Gautier burned this fort, and then hastily
retreated because he found that Clark was making friends with all the
Illinois Indians.
Clark's agents traded as far north as Portage, in Wisconsin. At Prairie
du Chien they induced Linctot, a famous French fur trader, to join the
Americans. Linctot put himself at the head of a party of five hundred
French and half-breed horsemen, who were of much assistance to Clark in
his various movements after the capture of Vincennes. Meanwhile another
large party, chiefly of Indians, assembled at Prairie du Chien in the
British cause, led by three French traders, Hesse, Du Charme, and Calve.
They raided the upper Mississippi valley, capturing provisions intended
for the Americans, and making a futile attack on the Spanish village of
St. Louis, which was thought to be assisting Clark.
Despite these military operations in Wisconsin, the English fur trade
continued in full strength, with headquarters upon the Island of
Mackinac, but with French agents and boatmen, whose principal dwelling
places were at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. Upon Lake Superior large
canoes and bateaux were used; but upon Lake Michigan were three small
sloops, the _Welcome_, the _Felicity_, and the _Archangel_, which
carried supplies and furs for the traders, and made frequent cruises to
see that the "Bostonians," as the French used to call the Americans,
obtained no foothold upon the shore of the lake.
Just before the close of the war, the British commander at Mackinac
Island, Captain Patrick Sinclair, held a council with the Indians, and
for a small sum purchased for himself their claims to that island and to
nearly all of the land now comprising Wisconsin. But the treaty of 1783,
between the British and the Americans, did not recognize this purchase,
and Sinclair found that he was no longer the owner of Wisconsin. It had
become, largely through the valor of Clark, and the persistence of our
treaty commissioners, a part of the territory of the United States.