cennes on the Wabash were induced
(late in July) to change their allegiance. On the 17th of December
Lieut.-Governor Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit,
recovered Vincennes and went into winter quarters. Late in February 1779
he was surprised by Clark and compelled to give up Vincennes and its
fort, Fort Sackville, and to surrender himself and his garrison of about
80 men, as prisoners of war. With the exception of Detroit and several
other posts on the Canadian frontier the whole of the North-West was
thus brought under American influence; many of the Indians, previously
hostile, became friendly, and the United States was put in a position to
demand the cession of the North-West in the treaty of 1783. For this
valuable service, in which Clark had freely used his own private funds,
he received practically no recompense either from Virginia or from the
United States, and for many years before his death he lived in poverty.
To him and his men, however, the Virginia legislature granted 150,000
acres of land in 1781, which was subsequently located in what are now
Clark, Floyd and Scott counties, Indiana; Clark's individual share was
8049 acres, but from this he realized little. Clark built Fort Jefferson
on the Mississippi, 4 or 5 m. below the mouth of the Ohio, in 1780,
destroyed the Indian towns Chillicothe and Piqua in the same year, and
in November 1782 destroyed the Indian towns on the Miami river. With
this last expedition his active military service virtually ended, and in
July 1783 he was relieved of his command by Virginia. Thereafter he
lived on part of the land granted to him by Virginia or in Louisville
for the rest of his life. In 1793 he accepted from Citizen Genet a
commission as "major-general in the armies of France, and
commander-in-chief of the French Revolutionary Legion in the Mississippi
Valley," and tried to raise a force for an attack upon the Spanish
possessions in the valley of the Mississippi. The scheme, however, was
abandoned after Genet's recall. Disappointed at what he regarded as his
country's ingratitude, and broken down by excessive drinking and
paralysis, he lost his once powerful influence and lived in comparative
isolation until his death, near Louisville, Kentucky, on the 13th of
February 1818.

See W.H. English, _Conquest of the Country north-west of the River
Ohio, 1778-1783, and Life of George Rogers Clark_ (2 vols.,
Indianapolis and Kansas City, 1896), an accurat