Fortunately the war cloud vanished as rapidly as it had formed. In the fall of 1790, Spain and England entered into a convention which averted hostilities. Yet the situation on both flanks of our long frontier was full of peril. Spain intrigued with the Creeks of the Southwest, while the British authorities in Canada encouraged the Indians north of the Ohio in their hostility to the white settlers. The attitude of the Indians along the Maumee and Wabash Rivers was so menacing that Governor St. Clair sent a punitive expedition against them; but the effect upon the Indians was so slight that a second expedition was set on foot in the following year. With a force of fourteen hundred raw recruits, unused to Indian warfare, St. Clair marched into the heart of the Indian country and suffered an inglorious defeat, on November 4, 1791. More than half of his command were killed, and scarcely a man escaped unscathed. It was a most humiliating reverse for the new Government, occurring almost under the eyes of British garrisons, and just as opposition was coming to a head in Congress. While two European powers were thus poised like vultures awaiting the demise of the new republic, a third darkened the sky. France deemed the moment auspicious for an attack upon the colonial possessions of her late ally, the King of Spain. The South American revolutionist, Miranda, had persuaded the French Ministry, as he had before persuaded Pitt, that the Spanish colonial empire was tottering and would readily fall with its rich spoil at the first resolute attack. The French Ministers were dazzled by the prospect of reviving a colonial empire in the new world. It seemed well within the range of possibilities to reduce Louisiana, and from the mouth of the Mississippi to begin the conquest of Spanish Central and Southern America. With this purpose in view, the Government sent as Minister to the United States, Citizen Genet, an ardent apostle of the Revolution. He was instructed to secure a treaty with the United States--"a true family compact"--which "would conduce rapidly to freeing Spanish America, to opening the navigation of the Mississippi to the inhabitants of Kentucky, to delivering our ancient brothers of Louisiana from the tyrannical yoke of Spain, and perhaps to uniting the fair star of Canada to the American constellation." But without waiting for the cooperation of the United States, Genet was to arouse the people of Kentucky and Louisiana by sending among them agents who should light the fires of revolution. [Map: The Northwest 1785-1795]