Military Roads of the Mississippi Basin

by Archer Butler Hulbert

“... I Viewed this Sheet of water for some time with Distrust,” Clark wrote in his Memoir, “but accusing myself of Doubting I amediately Set to work without holding any consultation about it or suffering anybody else to do so in my presence ordered a perogue amediately built and acted as though crossing the water would be only a piece of diversion.... My aneziety [anxiety] to cross this place continually increased as I saw that it would at once fling us into a situation of folorn hope as all Ideas of a Retreat would in some Measure be done away that if the Men began after this was accomplished to think seriously of what they had really suffered that they prefer^d Risking any seeming difficulty that might probably turn out favourable than to attempt to Retreat when they would be certain of Experiencing what they had already felt and if the weather should but Freeze altogether impracticable, except the Ice would bear them.” The heroism of Clark’s crossing of the Little Wabash has been retold on a thousand pages but it has rarely been suggested that he hurried into these dangers eagerly because they would serve to thwart any hope of retreat. He not only “burned his bridges,” but hastened impetuously across waters that could never be bridged, in the hope that they would freeze and cut off all dreams of retreat. This memoir, let it again be remarked, was written many years after the event—after Clark saw his great feat somewhat in the light we see it today. His letter to Mason, however, was written in the same year that the march was made; if not so self-laudatory, it is as interesting as the memoir, and perhaps more authentic. He thus described the crossing in that document: “This [flood] would have been enough to have stopped any set of men not in the same temper that we were. But in three days we contrived to cross by building a large canoe, ferried across the two channels; the rest of the way we waded, building scaffolds at each to lodge our baggage on until the horses crossed to take them.” Bowman’s record is that of the soldier: “14th. Finished the canoe and put her into the river about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. 15th. Ferried across the two Wabashes, it being then five miles in water to the opposite hills, where we encamped. Still raining. Orders not to fire any guns for the future, but in case of necessity.”

When, near Olney, Clark’s men crossed the Fox River on the 16th of February, it is probable that they camped on what is now the St. Louis Trace Road on one of the northeastern tributaries of the Fox. The day after, an 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.

The St. Louis Trace, near Lawrenceville, Illinois

Nothing can impress one with the heroism of this march like a visit to these low lands which are now proving of great value to horse and cattle owners of northern Illinois as grazing grounds. Though my journey over Clark’s route was made at the driest and most favorable season of the year, the mists, heavy as clouds, lay along the Bonpas, Fox, Little Wabash, Big Muddy, and Skillet and between them, and a thunderstorm made the modern road a veritable slough. From Vincennes to Xenia, the Baltimore and Ohio Southwestern Railway is parallel with the old St. Louis Trace which was Clark’s route here.[42] But the student will find the journey by the old trace, throwing its curling lengths along the hills from Lawrenceville to Sumner, a most interesting though taxing experience. At Sumner the trace drops into the bottom-lands where the mists seem to lie forever and where little villages are perched upon knolls of a few thousand feet in diameter, surrounded by swamps and prairies that are now being drained and cultivated widely. Here the old trace—for the ancient name clings to it—is helped along by dint of corduroy bridges and stone and wooden culverts. Between Sumner and Olney the corduroy bridges are frequent and exceedingly rough, particularly if you are hurrying along at nightfall to gain the portals of a comparatively comfortable inn at Olney. Westward the road ploughs its way through the marshes and the mist to the little Big Muddy and across to the Little Wabash about where the old trace ran. Here the fogs lie heaviest, shutting off all view of the low-lying, bushy wastes. In midsummer the fog and marshes warn the explorer away; what of this land when the rivers are loosed by the winter floods and are streaming wildly along the vast stretch of the stunted bush and vine? The scene presented to Clark’s Virginians and Frenchmen in February 1779 cannot by any means be pictured by one to whom these swamps are unknown; to such as know them, the picture, though probably imperfect, is one of horror. To row a boat where the current is swift is fatiguing labor, and to walk in the water, when each step may find one in a sink-hole and where the rank grasses, growing from heavy tufts, hold one’s feet as a cord, is all that the strongest man can endure for even a short period. The little spots of ground which here and there rise above the flood are covered with driftwood and infested with snakes.

In midsummer the scene was more pleasant. “Beyond Ombra we enter a Tartarian meadow,” wrote Volney in 1804, “interspersed with clumps of trees, but in general flat and naked, and windy and cold in winter. In summer it is filled with tall and strong shrubs, which brush the legs of the rider in his narrow path so much, that a journey out [to Kaskaskia] and back will wear out a pair of boots. Water is scarce [for drinking], and there is danger of being bewildered, as happened to one of my fellow travellers, three years before, when, with two others, he roamed about for seventeen days. Thunder, rain, gnats, and horse flies, are very troublesome in summer.”[43]