[Illustration: HUTCHINS'S SKETCH OF THE WABASH IN 1768, SHOWING TRACE OF THE PATH TO KASKASKIA [_From the original in the British Museum_]] Crossing the Kaskaskia River February 5, 1779, Clark's army lay three miles from Kaskaskia, for two days, "to tighten belts."[21] It is impossible to determine how much was known of their path onward. To many it had been well known for nearly a century--an old watershed prairie route marked out by the buffalo and followed by missionaries--the Appian Way of Illinois. The difficulty in studying this route, it should be stated at once, arises from the fact that while Kaskaskia was formerly the metropolis of western Illinois, the rise of St. Louis across the Mississippi had the effect of altering previously traveled routes. What has been ever known as the St. Louis Trace, coursing across Illinois from Vincennes to the Mississippi, became in the nineteenth century what the old Kaskaskia Trace had been in the eighteenth century, just as what had been the "Old Massac Road" became known as the St. Louis-Shawneetown Road. As a result, the later Kaskaskia travelers followed the St. Louis Trace--much-traveled, broad, and hard--as far westward as Marion County, and then turned due southwest to Kaskaskia. Therefore it is necessary not to confound the ancient Kaskaskia trace to Vincennes with the later Kaskaskia trace which was identical for some distance with the more northerly St. Louis Trace.[22] At the same time it is easy to err in separating the older and newer routes too widely in the attempt not to confound them. The newer St. Louis Trace runs across from Indiana (Vincennes) to Missouri (St. Louis) through the Illinois counties of Lawrence, Richland, Clay, Marion, Clinton, and St. Clair. The course is practically that of the old Mississippi and Ohio (now the Baltimore and Ohio Southwestern) Railway. The route passed over the best course between the points, as proved by the railway surveyors and engineers. But many rivers blocked the way; the first of these from Vincennes was the Embarras--so called, as in the case of many streams, because the great floods left deposits of driftwood which seriously impeded navigation. West of the Embarras came the petulant Little Wabash and the Big Muddy, draining thousands of square miles of swamp and prairie, and, in rainy seasons, uniting and spreading out five miles in width. West of the tributaries of the Little Wabash come those of the Kaskaskia. A few smaller Wabash and Mississippi tributaries, such as the Bonpas and St. Mary are headed by this trans-Illinois route, but it was not, in one sense, a watershed route, crossing the Embarras, Little Wabash, Fox, Beaucoup, and Kaskaskia and their tributaries.