Great was the wrath of Hamilton, the "hair buyer general," when he heard what the young Virginian had done. He at once sent out runners to stir up the savages; and, in the first week of October, he set out in person from Detroit with five hundred British regulars, French, and Indians. He recaptured Vincennes without any trouble. Clark had been able to leave only a few of the men he had sent there, and some of them deserted the moment they caught sight of the redcoats.
If Hamilton had pushed on through the Illinois country, he could easily have crushed the little American force; but it was no easy thing to march one hundred and forty miles over snow-covered prairies, and so the British commander decided to wait until spring.
When Clark heard of the capture of Vincennes, he knew that he had not enough men to meet Hamilton in open fight. What was he to do? Fortune again came to his aid.
The last of January, he heard that Hamilton had sent most of his men back to Detroit; that the Indians had scattered among the villages; and that the British commander himself was now wintering at Vincennes with about a hundred men. Clark at once decided to do what Hamilton had failed to do. Having selected the best of his riflemen, together with a few Creoles, { 12} one hundred and seventy men in all, he set out on February 7 for Vincennes.
All went well for the first week. They marched rapidly. Their rifles supplied them with food. At night, as an old journal says, they "broiled their meat over the huge camp fires, and feasted like Indian war dancers." After a week the ice had broken up, and the thaw flooded everything. The branches of the Little Wabash now made one great river five miles wide, the water even in the shallow places being three feet deep.
It took three days of the hardest work to ferry the little force across the flooded plain. All day long the men waded in the icy waters, and at night they slept as well as they could on some muddy hillock that rose above the flood. By this time they had come so near Vincennes that they dared not fire a gun for fear of being discovered.
Marching at the head of his chilled and foot-sore army, Clark was the first to test every danger.
"Come on, boys!" he would shout, as he plunged into the flood.