162.  George Rogers Clark gets help from Virginia and starts to attack Fort Kaskaskia.—­Daniel Boone had a friend in Virginia named George Rogers Clark,[5] who believed that he could take the British forts in the west and drive out the British from all that part of the country.  Virginia then owned most of the Wilderness.  For this reason Clark went to Patrick Henry, governor of Virginia, and asked for help.  The governor liked the plan, and let Clark have money to hire men to go with him and try to take Fort Kaskaskia to begin with.

Clark started in the spring of 1778 with about a hundred and fifty men.  They built boats just above Pittsburg[6] and floated down the Ohio River, a distance of over nine hundred miles.  Then they landed in what is now Illinois, and set out for Fort Kaskaskia.[7]

[Footnote 5:  George Rogers Clark was born near Monticello, Virginia.  See map in paragraph 140.]

[Footnote 6:  Pittsburg:  see map in paragraph 140.]

[Footnote 7:  Fort Kaskaskia:  see map in paragraph 161.]

163.  The march to Fort Kaskaskia; how a dance ended.—­It was a hundred miles to the fort, and half of the way the men had to find their way through thick woods, full of underbrush, briers, and vines.  The British, thinking the fort perfectly safe from attack, had left it in the care of a French officer.  Clark and his band reached Kaskaskia at night.  They found no one to stop them.  The soldiers in the fort were having a dance, and the Americans could hear the merry music of a violin and the laughing voices of girls.

Clark left his men just outside the fort, and, finding a door open, he walked in.  He reached the room where the fun was going on, and stopping there, he stood leaning against the door-post, looking on.  The room was lighted with torches; the light of one of the torches happened to fall full on Clark’s face; an Indian sitting on the floor caught sight of him; he sprang to his feet and gave a terrific war-whoop.  The dancers stopped as though they had been shot; the women screamed; the men ran to the door to get their guns.  Clark did not move, but said quietly, “Go on; only remember you are dancing now under Virginia, and not under Great Britain.”  The next moment the Americans rushed in, and Clark and his “Long Knives,” as the Indians called his men, had full possession of the fort.

[Illustration:  CLARK LOOKING ON AT THE DANCE.]

164.  How Fort Vincennes was taken; how the British got it back again; what Francis Vigo[8] did.—­Clark wanted next to march against Fort Vincennes, but he had not men enough.  There was a French Catholic priest[9] at Kaskaskia, and Clark’s kindness to him had made him our friend.  He said, I will go to Vincennes for you, and I will tell the French, who hold the fort for the British, that the Americans are their real friends, and that in this war they are in the right.  He went; the French listened to him, then hauled down the British flag and ran up the American flag in its place.