buffalo and followed by missionaries—the Appian Way of Illinois. The difficulty in studying this route, it should be stated at once, arises from the fact that while Kaskaskia was formerly the metropolis of western Illinois, the rise of St. Louis across the Mississippi had the effect of altering previously traveled routes. What has been ever known as the St. Louis Trace, coursing across Illinois from Vincennes to the Mississippi, became in the nineteenth century what the old Kaskaskia Trace had been in the eighteenth century, just as what had been the “Old Massac Road” became known as the St. Louis-Shawneetown Road. As a result, the later Kaskaskia travelers followed the St. Louis Trace—much-traveled, broad, and hard—as far westward as Marion County, and then turned due southwest to Kaskaskia. Therefore it is necessary not to confound the ancient Kaskaskia trace to Vincennes with the later Kaskaskia trace which was identical for some distance with the more northerly St. Louis Trace.[22] At the same time it is easy to err in separating the older and newer routes too widely in the attempt not to confound them. The newer St. Louis Trace runs across from Indiana (Vincennes) to Missouri (St. Louis) through the Illinois counties of Lawrence, Richland, Clay, Marion, Clinton, and St. Clair. The course is practically that of the old Mississippi and Ohio (now the Baltimore and Ohio Southwestern) Railway. The route passed over the best course between the points, as proved by the railway surveyors and engineers. But many rivers blocked the way; the first of these from Vincennes was the Embarras—so called, as in the case of many streams, because the great floods left deposits of driftwood which seriously impeded navigation. West of the Embarras came the petulant Little Wabash and the Big Muddy, draining thousands of square miles of swamp and prairie, and, in rainy seasons, uniting and spreading out five miles in width. West of the tributaries of the Little Wabash come those of the Kaskaskia. A few smaller Wabash and Mississippi tributaries, such as the Bonpas and St. Mary are headed by this trans-Illinois route, but it was not, in one sense, a watershed route, crossing the Embarras, Little Wabash, Fox, Beaucoup, and Kaskaskia and their tributaries.

These streams flow southward. Kaskaskia lay some fifty miles south of St. Louis and the later St. Louis Trace. The route of the more ancient Kaskaskia Trace to Vincennes, therefore, ran some seventy-five miles in a northeast direction; then, turning due east, it ran about one hundred miles to the Wabash. For the first seventy-five miles it was a watershed route, coursing along the highland prairies between Three Mile, Plum, Crooked, Grand Point, and Raccoon Creeks—all tributaries of the Kaskaskia River—on the west and north, and the heads of the St. Mary, Beaucoup, and Big Muddy Rivers on the east and south. This backbone line of prairie land runs straight northeast through Randolph and Washington Counties, cutting into corners of Perry, Jefferson, and Marion Counties. But here in Marion County the backbone, which had been accommodatingly trending eastward, turned quickly to the north to avoid the treacherous Little Wabash; at this point the old trace divided into two courses both of which ran to Vincennes. One course, probably that known later as the eastern half of the St. Louis Trace, passed through the center of Clay, Richland, and Lawrence Counties, crossing both the Little Wabash and Big Muddy a short distance above their junction, the Embarras near Lawrence, and the Wabash at Vincennes. The other branch of the Kaskaskia Trace passed through the northern portion of Wayne, Edwards and Wabash Counties, crossing the Little Wabash and Fox some two miles above their junction, the Bonpas River, near Bonpas, and the Wabash, two miles above St. Francisville. From this ford the route led up the eastern shore of the Wabash about nine miles to Vincennes. By any route, at any time of year, the journey across Illinois was a hardship no thinking man would undergo, save only on the most important mission; in the winter season—with the Wabash a surging sea, the Little Wabash a running lake, Crooked Creek treacherously straight, water frozen on the prairies, the “points” of timber swampy morasses—all communication landward was cut off, with the beavers and blue racers swimming for the high ground.

In their right mind, Clark’s adventurers would probably not have faced the wilderness into which they strode on the morning of February 7 on any private affair of life or death. Two magnetic influences drew them on; these Americans had brought to Illinois the spirit of 1775, a breath of a boasted freedom that was half license, in which the hot-headed French exulted. Believing the Americophobite British, the inhabitants of Kaskaskia had feared the barbarian Virginians more than any savages; Clark made capital of this in securing Kaskaskia, and later, by the kindness with which he treated the inhabitants and the freedom he gave them, accomplished a moral victory as sweeping and as picturesque as his military achievement. The proposed plan to carry to reconquered Vincennes the blessings of liberty enjoyed at Kaskaskia under Virginian rule appealed strongly to the impressionable habitants; to Clark’s own patriot soldiers the Vincennes campaign was the very acme of frontier adventure. Again, the young, daring Clark—quiet, resourceful, irrepressible—was a potent factor in pushing these men out on a journey of such unparalleled hardship. True, it is difficult to look beyond the later George Rogers Clark, of soiled reputation, to the cool, brave youth of twenty-seven years who led these men through the prairies of Illinois in 1779. To dim the brilliant lustre of such days as these was a heavy—if not the heaviest—price to pay for indiscretions of later years. Yet, as the records of this handful of men are studied, and especially when the track of their memorable march is picked out and followed, one can fancy the clear, bright picture of the Clark of 1779 and, happily, believe for the moment that there is no connection between him and the later Clark whom the Spaniards knew. It is plain that the French were charmed by the dashing Virginian and his Vincennes chimera. The record Clark left of the expedition—written ere the grasshopper was a burden or those were darkened who stood at the windows—clearly implies that the expedition was launched with a levity that it is sure all did not feel, though it may have been perfectly assumed; and as the days passed we shall see that Clark hurried on in order to get his men too far to turn back. His diplomatic endeavors, throughout those marvelous fifteen days, to lure his men on, to lift their thoughts from their sufferings and incite them to their almost superhuman tasks, are perhaps without parallel in the history of marching armies in America.

Departing from the two days’ camping-place, three miles from Kaskaskia, the course, for almost the entire first day, lay through thick forests, which have quite disappeared since that time, on the watershed between the Kaskaskia tributaries on the northwest and those of the St. Mary on the southeast.[23] Fortunately the journey at the outset was comparatively easy; the weather was warm for the