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About the close of the ninth moon, I led a large party against the Chippewas, Kaskaskias and Osages. This was the commencement of a long and arduous campaign, which terminated in my thirty-fifth year, after having had seven regular engagements and numerous small skirmishes. During this campaign several hundred of the enemy were slain. I killed thirteen of their bravest warriors with my own hands.
Insulated in the heart of the Indian country, in the midst of the most ferocious tribes, few men but Clark could have preserved this acquisition. Hamilton, the Governor of Detroit, a bold and tyrannical personage, determined, with an overwhelming force of British and Indians, to penetrate up the Ohio to Fort Pitt to sweep all the principal settlements in his way, and besiege Kaskaskias.
He called Lieutenant Tonti to the side of his couch, and directed him to take several canoes, with the larger part of the company, and make his way, as vigorously as possible, up the river three hundred miles to the mouth of the Illinois River. Then, ascending that, and its upper branch, the Kaskaskias, he was to cross by the portage to a tributary of the St.
The produce of the settled country descending those rivers will no longer pass in review of the Indian frontier but in a small portion, and, with the cession heretofore made by the Kaskaskias, nearly consolidates our possessions north of the Ohio, in a very respectable breadth from Lake Erie to the Mississippi.
On the swift waters of this great river which flows past us have come tidings to-day, and God Himself has sent them. To-morrow would have been too late. The ships and armies of the French king are on their way across the ocean to help us fight the tyrant, and this is the news that we bear to the Kaskaskias. When they hear this, the French of those towns will not fight against us.
Other auspicious circumstances crowned this result. Clark, intercepting a convoy from Canada, on their way to this post, took the mail, forty prisoners, and goods to the value of $45,000; and to crown all, his express from Virginia arrived with the thanks of the Assembly to him and his gallant band for their reduction of the country about Kaskaskias.
On the swift waters of this great river which flows past us have come tidings to-day, and God Himself has sent them. To-morrow would have been too late. The ships and armies of the French king are on their way across the ocean to help us fight the tyrant, and this is the news that we bear to the Kaskaskias. When they hear this, the French of those towns will not fight against us.
"When I was first appointed governor of Indiana Territory, these once powerful tribes were reduced to about thirty warriors, of whom twenty five were Kaskaskias, four Peorians, and a single Michiganian. There was an individual lately alive at St. Louis, who saw the enumeration of them made by the Jesuits in 1745, making the number of their warriors four thousand.
The army, for such it was, being commanded in person by the hero of Kaskaskias, the great protector, and almost founder of the West, summoned in haste to avenge the slaughter at the Blue Licks, a lamentable disaster, to which we have several times alluded, although it was foreign to our purpose to venture more than an allusion, and conducted with unexampled speed against the Indian towns on the Miami, had struck a blow which was destined long to be remembered by the Indians, thus for the first time assailed in their own territory.
At first I thought that our captors must be Arrapahas; but looking again at their costume, I was sure that they were Kaskaskias, belonging to a friendly tribe.
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