Vincennes has had a glorious past; it occupies a unique place among the historic towns of the country. Boston may have been the cradle of American independence; Philadelphia the place where that liberty was first announced; but after all Boston gave to the Union only Massachusetts, and Philadelphia only Pennsylvania. Vincennes gave us Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the great Middle West. But for the genius and perseverance of George Rogers Clark, when independence came the United Colonies would have stopped at the Alleghanies. The capture of Vincennes spread the jurisdiction of the colonies to the Mississippi, carrying with it American liberty, American progress, American ideas. More than this, it made possible the Louisiana Purchase, which in turn opened the way to the annexation of Texas, the securing of California and the Pacific coast, and the later acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines. The capture of Vincennes carried American liberty to a domain stretching from the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, yea even to the Orient--a domain which else would still be British or Spanish. It was Indiana, of which Vincennes was the chief part, that stopped the extension of slavery at the Ohio River, and made all the Northwest free territory. It was at Vincennes that Aaron Burr received his first decided check in his great scheme to dismember the Union. It was Benjamin Parke, a citizen of Vincennes, who placed in the first constitution of the State the clause making it obligatory on the Legislature to provide for the care and treatment of the insane, the first provision of the kind made by any civilized government, a provision which has revolutionized the treatment of the insane throughout the world. Such is the story of Vincennes, no frontier town like Albany or Pittsburg, for when its history began Vincennes was hundreds of miles out in the wilderness beyond the frontier line, and was still hundreds of miles beyond when the great event occurred which changed it from a French settlement under the jurisdiction of Great Britain into the chief seat of American power west of the Alleghanies. [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: [8] La Salle, in drawing his maps, made the Ouabache to empty into the Mississippi at Cairo, According to him the Oyo (Ohio) was a tributary of the Ouabache. About 1702, one, M. Juchereau, sent to establish a post for the protection of the traders in peltries, reported that he had established a post about forty leagues above the mouth of the Ouabache. Some writers have taken that to mean Vincennes, and it is so recorded in some of the encyclopædias, but his post was on what is now called the Ohio, and not on the Wabash.