oners.

This gallant act was greatly applauded in the camp, in Congress, and throughout the country, and made the enemy more cautious and circumspect. The hero was honored by Congress with thanks and a gold medal. These and some smaller successes at about this time, elated the Americans; but their joy was soon turned into sorrow, because of disasters in the extreme East. Massachusetts had fitted out almost forty vessels to attempt the seizure of a British post on the Penobscot River. The assailants delayed more than a fortnight after their arrival [July 25] before determining to carry the place by storm. Just as the troops were about to land for the purpose, a British fleet arrived, destroyed the flotilla, took many of the soldiers and sailors prisoners, and drove the remainder into the wilderness [Aug. 13]. These, after great hardships in the forests, reached Boston toward the close of September.

The storm of war was not confined to the Atlantic settlements. It burst over the lofty Alleghanies, and at an early period, even while it was gathering, a low, muttering peal of thunder came from clouds that brooded over the faroff wilderness of the great valleys of the West. Pioneers from the sea-board colonies were there, and they were compelled, almost at the moment of arrival. to wage war with the Indian, and hunt savage men as well as savage beasts. Among the earliest and most renowned of these pioneers, was Daniel Boone, the great "Hunter of Kentucky," of whom Byron wrote,

"Of all men, saving Sylla, the man-slayer,

Who passes for, in life and death, most lucky,

He went west of the Blue Ridge as early as 1769, and in 1773, his own and a few other families accompanied him to the paradise lying among the rich valleys south of the Ohio River. From that period until the power of the western Indians (who were continually incited to hostilities by the British and

Tories) was broken by George Rogers Clarke, Boone's life was one of almost continual warfare with the children of the forest.

Nor did Boone and his companions measure strength with the Indians alone;

1 Don Juan, VIII, lxi.

2 The wife and daughters of Boone were the first white females that set foot in the valleys west of the Alleghanies. Daniel Boone was born in Berks county, Pennsylvania, in 1734. While he was a small boy, his parents settled on the Yadkin, in North Carolina. When in the prime of life, he went over the mountains, and became a famous hunter. He planted the first settlement on the Kain-tuck-ee River, yet known as Boonsborough. During the Revolution he fought the Indians bravely, and was a prisoner among them for some time, but escaped. He was active in all matters pertaining to the settlement of Kentucky, until it became an independent State. Yet he was, by the technicalities of law, doomed to be disinherited of every foot of the soil he had helped to redeem from the wilderness, and, at almost eighty years of age, he was trapping beaver upon the Little Osage River, beyond the Mississippi. He died in Missouri, when almost ninety years of age, in September, 1820.

but in time they confronted white leaders and white followers. These conflicts, however, were only a series of border forays, until 1778, when Major George Rogers Clarke' led a regular expedition against the frontier posts of the enemy, in the wilderness in the far north-west, now the States of Indiana and Illinois. His little army rendezvoused at the Falls of the Ohio, where Louisville now stands, where he was joined by Simon Kenton, and other pioneers. From thence they penetrated the country northward, and on the 4th of July [1778], they captured Kaskaskia." On the 9th, they took the village of Cahokia, sixty miles further up the river; and finally, in August, the stronger British post of Vincennes, on the Wabash, fell into their hands.

Acting in the capacity of a peace-maker, Clarke was working successfully toward the pacification of the western tribes, when, in the month of January, 1779, the commander of the British fort at Detroit retook Vincennes. With one hundred and seventy-five men, Clarke penetrated the dreadful wilderness a hundred miles from the Ohio. For a whole week they traversed the "drowned lands" of Illinois, suffering every privation from wet, cold, and hunger. When they arrived at the Little Wabash, at a point where the forks of the stream are three miles apart, they found the intervening space covered with water to the depth of three feet. The points of dry land were five miles. apart, and all that distance those hardy soldiers, in the month of February, waded the cold snow-flood' in the forest, sometimes arm-pit deep! They arrived in sight of Vincennes on the 18th [February, 1779], and the next morning at dawn, with their faces blackened with gunpowder, to make themselves appear hideous, they crossed the river in a boat, and pushed toward the town. On the 20th, the stripes and stars were again unfurled over the fort at Vincennes and a captured garrison. Had armed men dropped from the clouds, the people and soldiers at Vincennes could not have been more astonished, than at the apparition of these troops, for it seemed impossible for them to have traversed the deluged country.

The indignation of the people was fiercely aroused by the atrocities at Wyoming and upon the head waters of the Susquehanna; and in the summer of 1779, General Sullivan' was sent into the heart of the country of the SIX NATIONS, to chastise and humble them. He collected troops in the Wyoming

1 George Rogers Clarke, was born in Albemarle county, Virginia, in 1752, and first appears in history as an adventurer beyond the Alleghanies, twenty years afterward. He had been a landsurveyor, and first went to the Ohio region in 1772. He was a captain in Dunmore's army [note 4, page 237] in 1774, and in 1775, he accompanied some emigrants to Kentucky. Pleased with the country, he determined to make it his home; and during the war for Independence, he labored nobly to secure the vast region of the west and north-west, as a home for the free. Under his leadership, what afterward became the North-west Territory, was disenthralled, and he has been appropriately styled the Father of that region. He was promoted to the rank of brigadier, after serving under the Baron Steuben against Arnold, in Virginia, in 1781, and at the close of the war he remained in Kentucky. He died near Louisville, in February, 1818, at the age of sixty-six years. Page 180. Note 3, page 241. * John Sullivan was born in Maine, in 1740. He was a delegate in the first Continental Congress [1774], and was one of the first eight brigadiers in the Continental Army. After being in active service about four years, he resigned his commission in 1779. He was afterward a member of Congress, and governor of New Hampshire, and died in 1795.

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Page 25. British emissaries had gained over to the royal interest the whole of the SIX NATIONS Except the Oneidas. These were kept loyal to the republicans, chiefly through the instru