early start was made in order that the famed Embarras might be reached before nightfall. It can well be believed that an intense, hushed excitement prevailed. The success of the invasion must depend on a swift surprise; it was probable that all would be lost if the approach was discovered; for, the Wabash being out of banks, the enemy, doubtless well supplied with boats, would have Clark’s band at their mercy. The provisions were fast giving out; surrender or starvation stared Clark in the face if discovered. Accordingly, Commissary Kennedy with three guides was sent forward “to cross the river Embarrass,” Clark wrote in his Memoir, “... and, if possible, to get some vessels in the vicinity of the town [Vincennes], but principally if he could get some information.” “About an hour, by sun, we got near the river Embarras,” Bowman wrote in his Journal; “Found the country all overflowed with water.” The Embarras was reached near Lawrenceville and the river was descended a few miles—“Traveled till 8 o’clock in mud and water,” wrote Bowman—before a camping-spot was found.

On the morning of the eighteenth the morning gun at Fort Sackville (Vincennes) was heard. The Wabash was reached at two o’clock in the afternoon, but no boats could be found by the parties of searchers sent out on rafts and in a canoe. Affairs were growing desperate, and the “very quiet but hungry” men set to work building canoes. Messengers were sent to hurry on “The Willing” but did not find her. “No provisions of any sort,” writes Bowman on the nineteenth, “now for two days. Hard fortune!” On the twentieth, as work on the canoes advanced, a canoe containing five Frenchmen from Vincennes was captured, and Clark learned that he was not yet discovered. On the twenty-first the army began to be ferried across the Wabash, “to a small hill called [Mammelle ?].” The crossing-place cannot be determined with precision. It was below the mouth of the Embarras, and not lower on the Wabash than a mile and a half above St. Francisville. Several mammelles (bluffs) lie on the eastern bank of the Wabash here. One lies four and one-half miles below the mouth of the Embarras. As the current was swift, the river broad, and the point of embarkation somewhat below the mouth of the Embarras, it is probable that the army landed further down the Wabash than has usually been described.[37] A march of three miles northward was made by the vanguard on the day it crossed, seemingly from the “lower” to the “upper” mammelle—the “next hill of the same name,” according to Bowman. On the twenty-second another league was covered by exhausting efforts, making in all six miles from the crossing-place. The camp this night is definitely known to be a high, twenty-acre sugar orchard still remembered as “Sugar Camp,” three and one-half miles from Vincennes. Clark was now at the lower end of the “Lower Prairie,” and there were two courses to Vincennes which lay on the rising ground across the three miles of flooded prairie.[38] One, by way of the Grand Marais or swamp in the middle of the prairie, was impassable; the other route, known as the “two buttes route,” was the difficult alternative. The first butte was “Warrior’s Island,” a ten-acre hill heavily wooded, a mile and a half from Sugar Camp and two miles from Vincennes. It could be and was reached by the strong men wading breast high, drawing or paddling their feebler comrades in the canoes. The second butte, “Bunker Hill,” was not on the direct line to Vincennes, but was a high point to the east on the same plateau on which Vincennes stood. At one o’clock of the twenty-third, the floundering army, half numb with cold and weak from exposure, reached Warrior’s Island. From here Clark sent his first message, diplomatically directed to the inhabitants of Vincennes:

“Gentlemen—Being now within two miles of your village with my army, determined to take your fort this night, and not being willing to surprise you, I take this method to request such of you as are true citizens, and willing to enjoy the liberty I bring you, to remain still in your houses, and those, if any there be, who are friends to the king, will instantly repair to the fort[39] and join the Hair-buyer General,[40] and fight like men. And if any such as do not go to the fort shall be discovered afterwards, they may depend on severe punishment. On the contrary, those who are true friends to liberty may depend on being well treated; and I once more request them to keep out of the streets, for every one I find in arms on my arrival I shall treat as an enemy.”[41]

At eight o’clock that night the famished army waded to Bunker Hill, and soon the outskirts of the town were invested, under fire of the fort. On the twenty-fourth Hamilton surrendered, and the campaign, prosecuted under difficulties which today cannot be justly described, ended in complete triumph.