[1525] Withers's Border Warfare, p. 213; Perkins's Annals, p. 235; Butler's Kentucky, p. 110.
[1526] [See ante, p. 681.—Ed.]
[1527] Writings, i. 259. The letter abridged is in Sparks's Corresp. of the Am. Rev., iii. 98.
[1528] Writings, i. 280; Sparks's Corresp., etc., iii. 175.
[1529] Gen. Washington instructed Col. Brodhead to see that no Continental officer outranked Col. Clark. "I do not think", he wrote, "that the charge of the enterprise could have been committed to better hands. I have not the pleasure of knowing the gentleman personally; but independently of the proofs he has given of his activity and address, the unbounded confidence which, I am told, the Western people repose in him is a matter of vast importance.... In general, give every countenance and assistance to this enterprise. I shall expect a punctual compliance with this order. Col. Clark will probably be the bearer of this himself" (Writings, vii. 343-345).
[1530] Sparks's Corresp., etc., iii. 244.
[1531] [See ante, pp. 495, 546.—Ed.]
[1532] Writings, i. 288. See Steuben's report to Washington, Sparks's Corresp., etc., iii. 204. At the time of Arnold's descent on Virginia, a scheme was devised by Jefferson and Baron Steuben to capture the arch-traitor alive, and hang him. The scheme is set forth in a letter of Jefferson, with no address (Writings, i. 289), dated Richmond, Jan. 21, 1781; and it immediately follows the one describing Col. Clark's ambuscade. The purpose of the letter is to enlist the services of the person addressed in this hazardous enterprise. The writer says he has "peculiar confidence in the men from the western side of the mountains, whose courage and fidelity would be above all doubt. Your perfect knowledge of those men personally, and my confidence in your discretion, induces me to ask you to pick from among them proper characters, in such numbers as you think best, and engage them to undertake to seize and bring off this greatest of all traitors. Whether this may be best effected by their going in as friends and awaiting their opportunity, or otherwise, is left to themselves. The smaller the number the better, so that they be sufficient to manage him." He offers them a reward of five thousand guineas for bringing him off alive, and says "their names will be recorded with glory in history with those of Vanwert, Paulding, and Williams." The editor states in a note that the person addressed "was probably Gen. [John Peter Gabriel] Mühlenberg." Gen. Mühlenberg was a Pennsylvanian, and never resided west of the mountains. The person was doubtless George Rogers Clark, who was then in Virginia, and was too deeply interested in his Detroit expedition to engage in the scheme.
[1533] Sparks's Corresp., etc., iii. 323.
[1534] Ibid. iii. 455. "I think", Gen. Irvine adds, "there is too much reason to fear that Gen. Clark's and Col. Gibson's expeditions falling through will greatly encourage the savages to fall on the country with double fury, or perhaps the British from Detroit to visit this post [Fort Pitt], which, instead of being in a tolerable state of defence, is, in fact, nothing but a heap of ruins." The relations of Detroit to the war in the Northwest, as the centre of British intrigues among the Indians, and of British instigation of the savages to make forays on the region of the Ohio, is well set forth in Charles I. Walker's Northwest during the Revolution, the annual address before the Wisconsin Hist. Soc. in 1871 (Madison, 1871; also in Pioneer Soc. of Michigan Coll., iii., Lansing, 1881). A plan of the Detroit River at this time is given in Parkman's Pontiac, vol. i. Col. Arent Schuyler De Peyster, who commanded at Detroit, 1776-1785, gives something of his experiences in his Miscellanies by an Officer (Dumfries, 1813). The latest history of Detroit is Silas Farmer's Detroit and Michigan (Detroit, 1884), where, in ch. 39, the revolutionary story is told. He has retold it in the Mag. of Western Hist., Jan., 1886.