When, near Olney, Clark's men crossed the Fox River on the 16th of February, it is probable that they camped on what is now the St. Louis Trace Road on one of the northeastern tributaries of the Fox. The day after, an early start was made in order that the famed Embarras might be reached before nightfall. It can well be believed that an intense, hushed excitement prevailed. The success of the invasion must depend on a swift surprise; it was probable that all would be lost if the approach was discovered; for, the Wabash being out of banks, the enemy, doubtless well supplied with boats, would have Clark's band at their mercy. The provisions were fast giving out; surrender or starvation stared Clark in the face if discovered. Accordingly, Commissary Kennedy with three guides was sent forward "to cross the river Embarrass," Clark wrote in his _Memoir_, "... and, if possible, to get some vessels in the vicinity of the town [Vincennes], but principally if he could get some information." "About an hour, by sun, we got near the river Embarras," Bowman wrote in his _Journal_; "Found the country all overflowed with water." The Embarras was reached near Lawrenceville and the river was descended a few miles--"Traveled till 8 o'clock in mud and water," wrote Bowman--before a camping-spot was found. On the morning of the eighteenth the morning gun at Fort Sackville (Vincennes) was heard. The Wabash was reached at two o'clock in the afternoon, but no boats could be found by the parties of searchers sent out on rafts and in a canoe. Affairs were growing desperate, and the "very quiet but hungry" men set to work building canoes. Messengers were sent to hurry on "The Willing" but did not find her. "No provisions of any sort," writes Bowman on the nineteenth, "now for two days. Hard fortune!" On the twentieth, as work on the canoes advanced, a canoe containing five Frenchmen from Vincennes was captured, and Clark learned that he was not yet discovered. On the twenty-first the army began to be ferried across the Wabash, "to a small hill called [Mammelle ?]." The crossing-place cannot be determined with precision. It was below the mouth of the Embarras, and not lower on the Wabash than a mile and a half above St. Francisville. Several _mammelles_ (bluffs) lie on the eastern bank of the Wabash here. One lies four and one-half miles below the mouth of the Embarras. As the current was swift, the river broad, and the point of embarkation somewhat below the mouth of the Embarras, it is probable that the army landed further down the Wabash than has usually been described.[37] A march of three miles northward was made by the vanguard on the day it crossed, seemingly from the "lower" to the "upper" _mammelle_--the "next hill of the same name," according to Bowman. On the twenty-second another league was covered by exhausting efforts, making in all six miles from the crossing-place. The camp this night is definitely known to be a high, twenty-acre sugar orchard still