the value of the new land warranted; for they were too short-sighted
rightly to estimate what the frontiersmen had really done. When he had
finally raised his troops he was bothered by requests from the different
forts to aid detachments of the local militia in expeditions against
bands of marauding Indians.

He Starts Down the Ohio.

But Clark never for a moment wavered nor lost sight of his main object.
He worked steadily on, heedless of difficulty and disappointment, and
late in the spring at last got together four small companies of
frontiersmen from the clearings and the scattered hunters' camps. In
May, 1778, he left the Redstone settlements, taking not only his
troops--one hundred and fifty in all [Footnote: Clark's letter to George
Mason, Nov. 19, 1779. Given in "Clark's Campaign in the Illinois"
(Cincinnati, 1869), for the first time; one of Robert Clarke's excellent
Ohio Valley Historical Series.]--but also a considerable number of
private adventurers and settlers with their families. He touched at
Pittsburg and Wheeling to get his stores. Then the flotilla of clumsy
flatboats, manned by tall riflemen, rowed and drifted cautiously down
the Ohio between the melancholy and unbroken reaches of Indian-haunted
forest. The presence of the families shows that even this expedition had
the usual peculiar western character of being undertaken half for
conquest, half for settlement.

He landed at the mouth of the Kentucky, but rightly concluded that as a
starting-point against the British posts it would be better to choose a
place farther west, so he drifted on down the stream, and on the 27th of
May [Footnote: This is the date given in the deposition, in the case of
Floyd's heirs, in 1815; see MSS. in Col. Durrett's library at