Clark was not slow to show his power.
"Think, men," he said sternly, "of the cries of the widows and the fatherless on our frontier. Do your duty."
Six of the savages were tomahawked before the fort, where the garrison could see them, and their dead bodies were thrown into the river.
The British defended their fort for a few days, but could not stand against the fire of the long rifles. It was sure death for a gunner to try to fire a cannon. Not a man dared show himself at a porthole, through which the rifle bullets were humming like mad hornets.
Hamilton the "hair buyer" gave up the defense as a bad job, and surrendered the fort, defended by cannon and occupied by regular troops, as he says in his journal, "to a set of uncivilized Virginia backwoodsmen armed with rifles."
Tap! tap! sounded the drums, as Clark gave the signal, and down came the British colors.
Thirteen cannon boomed the salute over the flooded plains of the Wabash, and a hundred frontier soldiers shouted themselves hoarse when the stars and stripes went up at Vincennes, never to come down again.
The British authority over this region was forever at an end. It only remained for Clark to defend what he had so gallantly won.
Of all the deeds done west of the Alleghanies during the war of the Revolution, Clark's campaign, in the region which seemed so remote and so strange to our forefathers, is the most remarkable. The vast region north of the Ohio River was wrested from the British crown. When peace came, a few years later, the boundary lines of the United States were the Great Lakes on the north, and on the west the Mississippi River.