A great debt of thanks is due to Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, Secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, for assistance and advice; to Josiah Morrow of Lebanon, Ohio, the author is indebted for help in determining portions of Harmar's route; and to Francis E. Wilson, President of the Greenville Historical Society, many thanks are due for help in questions concerning the pathway of the intrepid leader known to the East as "Mad Anthony" Wayne, but remembered in the West as the "Blacksnake" and the "Whirlwind," because he doubled his track like a blacksnake and swept over his roads like a whirlwind. A. B. H. MARIETTA, OHIO, September 14, 1903. Military Roads of the Mississippi Basin The Conquest of the Old Northwest CHAPTER I THE CLARK ROUTES THROUGH ILLINOIS On the twenty-fourth of June, 1778, George Rogers Clark, with about one hundred and seventy-five patriot adventurers, left the little pioneer settlement on Corn Island, in the Ohio River, opposite the present site of Louisville, Kentucky, for the conquest of the British posts of Kaskaskia and Vincennes in the "Illinois country."[1] The boats running day and night, the party reached Clark's first stopping-place, an island in the Ohio near the mouth of the Tennessee River, in four days. Just below this island was the site of old Fort Massac--now occupied by Metropolis, Massac County, Illinois--built probably by a vanguard from Fort Duquesne, a generation before, when the French clearly foresaw the end of their reign on the upper Ohio. Here, almost a century before that, was the old trading-station of Juchereau and the mission of Mermet--the subsequent "soul of the mission of Kaskaskia," as Bancroft describes him. The situation was strategic on two accounts: it was a site well out of the reach of the Ohio floods, and it was near the mouths of both the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers--valleys known of old to the Shawanese and Cherokees. As a coign of vantage for traders and missionaries, it had been of commanding importance. It was, likewise, near the Ohio terminus of several old buffalo routes across Illinois, roads which became connecting links between Kaskaskia, on the river bearing that name near the Mississippi, and the mission at Fort Massac. The old paths of the buffalo, long known as hunting traces, offered the traveler from the Ohio to the old-time metropolis of Illinois a short-cut by land, saving thrice the distance by water, and obviated stemming the swift tides of the Mississippi. One of the principal backbones of Illinois was threaded by these primeval routes, and high ground between the vast cypress swamps and mist-crowned drowned lands of Illinois was a boon to any traveler, especially that first traveler, the bison. This high ground ran between Kaskaskia and Shawneetown, on the Ohio River, the course becoming later a famous state highway. Its earliest name was the "Kaskaskia Trace."