George Rogers Clark's Illinois Campaign: American Revolution on the Frontier 1777 -1779 скачать в хорошем качестве

George Rogers Clark's Illinois Campaign: American Revolution on the Frontier 1777 -1779

Among the successes of the Americans during the Revolutionary War, the Illinois Campaign led by George Rogers Clark into the frontier Illinois Country is definitely one of the more overlooked. Sparsely populated by Europeans by the time of the revolution, the Illinois Country was primarily inhabited by French settlers and Native Americans. The British had demilitarized the region in 1775 at the start of the war, believing the region's risk of attack to be small and left only a small contingent under a French officer to guard the administrative town of Kaskaskia on the Mississippi in what is now Illinois. Instead the British encouraged and armed Native raids from there and Fort Detroit on colonial settlements in the Ohio Country and across the Ohio River in Kentucky. In 1777, George Rogers Clark, a young major in the Virginia militia, came to Governor Patrick Henry with a proposal to conduct an expedition to the Illinois Country to seize British forts and outposts to stop native raids in Kentucky. Henry agreed, but desiring secrecy, had Clark refrain from informing his men of the true purpose of the campaign until they were underway. Reaching the Falls of the Ohio River in May 1778, Clark's Illinois Regiment departed in June and occupied Kaskaskia without firing a shot by July 4th. Clark's men would succeed at gaining the loyalties of the French inhabitants of the region and occupied several other towns like Cahokia, St. Philippe and Vincennes on the Wabash River in modern day Indiana. When the British retook Vincennes and its Fort Sackville in December 1778, Clark hastily organized a winter march to surprise them, or else risk losing the Illinois Country in the spring. On February 24, 1779 Clark's men reached Vincennes after marching 180 miles and captured Fort Sackville within days.