In their right mind, Clark's adventurers would probably not have faced the wilderness into which they strode on the morning of February 7 on any private affair of life or death. Two magnetic influences drew them on; these Americans had brought to Illinois the spirit of 1775, a breath of a boasted freedom that was half license, in which the hot-headed French exulted. Believing the Americophobite British, the inhabitants of Kaskaskia had feared the barbarian Virginians more than any savages; Clark made capital of this in securing Kaskaskia, and later, by the kindness with which he treated the inhabitants and the freedom he gave them, accomplished a moral victory as sweeping and as picturesque as his military achievement. The proposed plan to carry to reconquered Vincennes the blessings of liberty enjoyed at Kaskaskia under Virginian rule appealed strongly to the impressionable _habitants_; to Clark's own patriot soldiers the Vincennes campaign was the very acme of frontier adventure. Again, the young, daring Clark--quiet, resourceful, irrepressible--was a potent factor in pushing these men out on a journey of such unparalleled hardship. True, it is difficult to look beyond the later George Rogers Clark, of soiled reputation, to the cool, brave youth of twenty-seven years who led these men through the prairies of Illinois in 1779. To dim the brilliant lustre of such days as these was a heavy--if not the heaviest--price to pay for indiscretions of later years. Yet, as the records of this handful of men are studied, and especially when the track of their memorable march is picked out and followed, one can fancy the clear, bright picture of the Clark of 1779 and, happily, believe for the moment that there is no connection between him and the later Clark whom the Spaniards knew. It is plain that the French were charmed by the dashing Virginian and his Vincennes chimera. The record Clark left of the expedition--written ere the grasshopper was a burden or those were darkened who stood at the windows--clearly implies that the expedition was launched with a levity that it is sure all did not feel, though it may have been perfectly assumed; and as the days passed we shall see that Clark hurried on in order to get his men too far to turn back. His diplomatic endeavors, throughout those marvelous fifteen days, to lure his men on, to lift their thoughts from their sufferings and incite them to their almost superhuman tasks, are perhaps without parallel in the history of marching armies in America.