The junction of the old Kaskaskia Trace with the modern St. Louis Trace was on the Isaac Elliott farm, one mile east of old Xenia, half a mile north of the newer Xenia.[61] It was pointed out to the writer by Sandy Alexander Nelms of Salem, Illinois, one of the very few remaining old-time stage-drivers on the St. Louis Trace of the thirties, who was born near this junction. He remembers portions of the old path very well, though it has not, within his lifetime, been used as a highway. Within the borders of the present Xenia the outline of the old trace is exceedingly plain. The frontispiece of this volume is from a recent photograph of this part of the road. Mr. Nelms informs the writer that the old trace could, in early years, be followed by the camping-spots, where blue-grass sprang up when the prairie-grass was killed out.[62] Blue-grass on the Illinois routes, like the apple-trees on the old track from Albany to the Mohawk in New York, was the first sign of coming civilization. Mr. Nelms remembers with distinctness that in a corn-field near the present Baltimore and Ohio Southwestern Railway depot at Xenia the route of the old trace could be followed by the color of the earth and heavier growth of corn. The general color of the field was black but a wide strip of yellowish clay was the course of the old Kaskaskia Trace--generations of travel over the narrow aisle in the old-time forests having changed the nature of the soil. Here, it is said, the crop of corn was distinctly heavier and better than elsewhere on the prairie. Wherever this old trace may be found it speaks of Clark and Clark only. All the story of its other days is forgotten for those hard fifteen during which that daring youth drew his comrades "insensibly" onward, amid jests and raillery, to the British stronghold from which thousands of savages had been urged to war upon the feeble Kentucky stations. Boone's Wilderness Road meant much, but if Fort Sackville and the other Wabash Valley centers had been a trifle more potent than they were, it would have become as overgrown as was Braddock's Road when Forbes marched to Fort Duquesne three years after Braddock. The two posts at the termini of the Vincennes Trace, and the dark councils of their commanders, were a more serious menace to Kentucky's safety than all the redskins north of the Ohio River. It was the British-fed, British-armed, and British-led Indians that made possible the dream of a reconquest of Kentucky. After George Rogers Clark led his men over that narrow, winding trace, through flooded Grand Cote Prairie and over the raging Little and Great Wabash, that danger of British conquest of Kentucky was practically eliminated from the western situation. The capture of Vincennes was the first chapter in the conquest of the Old Northwest. CHAPTER II MIAMI VALLEY CAMPAIGNS