advice; to Josiah Morrow of Lebanon, Ohio, the author is indebted for help in determining portions of Harmar’s route; and to Francis E. Wilson, President of the Greenville Historical Society, many thanks are due for help in questions concerning the pathway of the intrepid leader known to the East as “Mad Anthony” Wayne, but remembered in the West as the “Blacksnake” and the “Whirlwind,” because he doubled his track like a blacksnake and swept over his roads like a whirlwind.

A. B. H.

Marietta, Ohio, September 14, 1903.

Military Roads of the
Mississippi Basin

The Conquest of the Old Northwest

CHAPTER I

THE CLARK ROUTES THROUGH ILLINOIS

On the twenty-fourth of June, 1778, George Rogers Clark, with about one hundred and seventy-five patriot adventurers, left the little pioneer settlement on Corn Island, in the Ohio River, opposite the present site of Louisville, Kentucky, for the conquest of the British posts of Kaskaskia and Vincennes in the “Illinois country.”[1]

The boats running day and night, the party reached Clark’s first stopping-place, an island in the Ohio near the mouth of the Tennessee River, in four days. Just below this island was the site of old Fort Massac—now occupied by Metropolis, Massac County, Illinois—built probably by a vanguard from Fort Duquesne, a generation before, when the French clearly foresaw the end of their reign on the upper Ohio. Here, almost a century before that, was the old trading-station of Juchereau and the mission of Mermet—the subsequent “soul of the mission of Kaskaskia,” as Bancroft describes him. The situation was strategic on two accounts: it was a site well out of the reach of the Ohio floods, and it was near the mouths of both the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers—valleys known of old to the Shawanese and Cherokees. As a coign of vantage for traders and missionaries, it had been of commanding importance. It was, likewise, near the Ohio terminus of several old buffalo routes across Illinois, roads which became connecting links between Kaskaskia, on the river bearing that name near the Mississippi, and the mission at Fort Massac. The old paths of the buffalo, long known as hunting traces, offered the traveler from the Ohio to the old-time metropolis of Illinois a short-cut by land, saving thrice the distance by water, and obviated stemming the swift tides of the Mississippi. One of the principal backbones of Illinois was threaded by these primeval routes, and high ground between the vast cypress swamps and mist-crowned drowned lands of Illinois was a boon to any traveler, especially that first traveler, the bison. This high ground ran between Kaskaskia and Shawneetown, on the Ohio River, the course becoming later a famous state highway. Its earliest name was the “Kaskaskia Trace.”

Clark’s spies, sent out to Illinois a year before, undoubtedly advised him to land at Fort Massac and, gaining from there this famous highway, to pursue it to Kaskaskia. His plan of surprising the British post necessitated his pursuing unexpected courses. It was well known that the British watched the Mississippi well; therefore he chose the land route. Here, at the mouth of the Tennessee, his men brought in a canoe full of white traders who had recently been in Kaskaskia; certain of these were engaged to guide Clark thither. The party dropped down to Massac Creek, which enters the Ohio just above the site of the old fort, and in that inlet secreted their flat-boats ready to begin their intrepid march of one hundred and twenty miles across country.[2]

As this little company of eight or nine score adventurers drew around their fires on Massac Creek, they little dreamed, we may be sure, of the fame they were to gain from this plucky excursion into the prairies of Illinois. It was impossible for them to lift their eyes above the commonplaces of the journey and the possibilities of the coming encounter, and see in true perspective what the capture of Illinois meant to poor Kentucky. It is not less difficult for us to turn our eyes from these general results, which were so brilliant, and get a clear insight into the commonplaces of this memorable little campaign—to hear the talk of the tired men about the fires as they cleaned the heavy clods of mud from shoes and moccasins, examined their guns, viewed the night, and then talked softly of the possibilities of the morrow, and dreamed, in the ruddy firelight, of those at home. Of all companies of famous campaigners on the Indian trails of America, this company was the smallest and the most picturesque. Clark had but little over half the force which Washington commanded at Fort Necessity in 1754.

Little Massac Creek is eleven miles in length but drains seventy square miles of territory. This fact is a significant description of the nature of the northern and central portions of Massac County. From the Cache River a string of lakes extends in a southeast and then northeast direction to Big Bay River, varying in width from one to four miles; around the lakes lies a much greater area of cypress swamps and treacherous “sloughs” altogether impassable. The water of these lakes drains sometimes into the Cache and at other times into the Big Bay—depending upon the stage of water in the Ohio.[3]

There were three routes from Fort Massac toward Kaskaskia; one, which may well be called the Moccasin Gap route, circled to the eastward to get around the lakes and swamps of Massac County; it passed eastward into Pope County, where it struck the Kaskaskia-Shawneetown highway. This route ran two and one-half miles west of Golconda, Pope County, and on to Sulphur or Round Spring. From thence through Moccasin Gap, section 3, township 12, range 4E, Johnson County; thence it ran directly for the prairie country to the northward. As noted, this route merged into the famous old Kaskaskia and Shawneetown route across Illinois—what was known as the Kaskaskia Trace—in Pope County. It was this course which in earliest times had been blazed by the French as the safest common highway between Kaskaskia and the trading and mission station (and later fort) at Massac. The trees along the course were marked with the proper number of miles by means of a hot iron, the figures then being painted red. “Such I saw them,” records Governor Reynolds, “in 1800. This road made a great curve to the north to avoid the swamps and rough country on the sources of the Cash [Cache] river, and also to obtain the prairie country as soon as possible. This road ... was called the old Massac road by the Americans.”