The crime consisted in employing the savages at all in a war waged against men, women, and children alike.  Undoubtedly the British at Detroit followed the example of the French [Footnote:  See Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe,” II., 421, for examples of French payments, some of a peculiarly flagrant sort.  A certain kind of American pseudo-historian is especially fond of painting the British as behaving to us with unexampled barbarity; yet nothing is more sure than that the French were far mote cruel and less humane in their contests with us than were the British.] in paying money to the Indians for the scalps of their foes.  It is equally beyond question that the British acted with much more humanity than their French predecessors had shown.  Apparently the best officers utterly disapproved of the whole business of scalp buying; but it was eagerly followed by many of the reckless agents and partisan leaders, British, tories, and Canadians, who themselves often accompanied the Indians against the frontier and witnessed or shared in their unmentionable atrocities.  It is impossible to acquit either the British home government or its foremost representatives at Detroit of a large share in the responsibility for the appalling brutality of these men and their red allies; but the heaviest blame rests on the home government.

    The Country Pacified.

Clark soon received some small reinforcements, and was able to establish permanent garrisons at Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia.  With the Indian tribes who lived round about he made firm peace; against some hunting bands of Delawares who came in and began to commit ravages, he waged ruthless and untiring war, sparing the women and children, but killing all the males capable of bearing arms, and he harried most of them out of the territory, while the rest humbly sued for peace.  His own men worshipped him; the French loved and stood in awe of him while the Indians respected and feared him greatly.  During the remainder of the Revolutionary war the British were not able to make any serious effort to shake the hold he had given the Americans on the region lying around and between Vincennes and the Illinois.  Moreover he so effectually pacified the tribes between the Wabash and the Mississippi that they did not become open and formidable foes of the whites until, with the close of the war against Britain, Kentucky passed out of the stage when Indian hostilities threatened her very life.

The fame of Clark’s deeds and the terror of his prowess spread to the southern Indians, and the British at Natchez trembled lest they should share the fate that had come on Kaskaskia and Vincennes. [Footnote:  State Department MSS. [Intercepted Letters], No. 51, Vol.  II., pp. 17 and 45.  Letter of James Colbert, a half-breed in the British interest, resident at that time among the Chickasaws, May 25, 1779, etc.] Flat-boats from the Illinois went down to New Orleans, and keel-boats returned