Men like Daniel Boone, James Harrod and Benjamin Logan, fighting, bleeding, hunting game for the beleaguered garrisons, were the precursors of George Rogers Clark. Clark possessed prescience. He knew the British had determined on the extermination of the Kentucky settlements, because these settlements thwarted the British plan of preserving the west as a red man's wilderness. He had been in the fights at Harrodstown, in 1777, and doubtless knew that the British partisans at Detroit were paying money for scalps. Knowing that all the irruptions of savages into Kentucky were encouraged and set on foot from Kaskaskia, Vincennes and Detroit, he suddenly resolved upon the bold project of capturing these strongholds. This would put the British upon the defensive, relieve the frontiers of Kentucky, Virginia and Pennsylvania, and in the end add a vast territory to the domain of the republic. In the accomplishment of all these designs the soil of Kentucky was to be used as a base of operations. It is not the purpose of this work to give a history of the Clark campaigns, nor of the daring stratagems of that great leader in effecting his purposes. Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, each in turn fell into his hands, and when Henry Hamilton, the British lieutenant-governor at Detroit, received the astounding news that the French on the Mississippi and the Wabash had sworn allegiance to the Americans, he abandoned his enterprise of capturing Fort Pitt and at once entered upon a campaign to retrieve the lost possessions and "sweep" the Kentuckians out of the country. His scheme was formidable. With a thousand men, and with artillery to demolish the stockades and destroy the frontier posts, he proposed to drive the settlers back across the mountains. "Undoubtedly," says Roosevelt, "he would have carried out his plan, and have destroyed all the settlements west of the Alleghenies, had he been allowed to wait until the mild weather brought him his host of Indian allies and his reinforcements of regulars and militia from Detroit." How Clark with his Virginians and Kentuckians, and a few French allies from the western posts, anticipated his attack, swam the drowned lands of the Wabash, and surprised him at Vincennes, has been well told. Instead of "sweeping" Kentucky, the "hair-buyer" general was taken a prisoner to the dungeons of Virginia, and the newborn possessions were erected into the county of Illinois.