to enforce them.
Hopelessly inadequate as this constitution was to prove, the small
States, notably Maryland, refused to approve it until the larger States
ceded their Western lands to the common Government. Virginia, possessed
of the most extensive domain, held out longest, but finally renounced
her claims January 2, 1781; and in March of that year it was announced
that Maryland had ratified the Articles of Confederation, which thus
became the first constitution of the United States.

In 1779, while the States were wrangling over their Western lands, a
little band of valiant backwoodsmen won a victory which gave substance
to their claims and made their cessions something more than waste paper.
Throughout the war the frontier communities were most loyal supporters
of the Revolution. Their expert riflemen, organized in companies, of
which that of Daniel Morgan is perhaps the most famous, served in the
army of Washington, helped Gates to win the battle of Saratoga, and were
of indispensable service in driving Clinton out of North Carolina in
1780, and Cornwallis in 1781. The borderers of Pennsylvania and
Virginia, and the little settlements at Watauga and Boonesboro,
maintained a heroic defense against the Indians, who were paid by
General Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, to wage a war of
massacre and pillage on the frontier. Against intermittent Indian raids
the backwoodsmen could defend their homes; but so long as the British
held Detroit and Vincennes and the Mississippi forts, there could be no
peace in the interior, and even if the colonies won independence, it
was likely that the Alleghanies would mark the boundary of the new
State. Under these circumstances, George Rogers Clark, trapper and
expert woodsman and Indian fighter, set himself, with the confident
idealism of the frontiersman, to achieve an object which must have
seemed to most men no more than a forlorn hope. It was in 1777 that he
crossed the mountains to Virginia, secured the secret and semi-official
authorization of Patrick Henry, the Governor of the State, and raised a
company of one hundred and fifty men with which to undertake nothing
less than the destruction of British power in the great Northwest.

In May, 1778, the little band floated from Redstone down the Ohio, at
the falls built a fort which they named Louisville in honor of the
French King, and finally, on July 4, reached Kaskaskia. Guided by some
hunters who had joined them, th