Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 8).djvu/82

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78
MILITARY ROADS

Clark's deportment was demoralizing and his campaign was a practical failure. However, before starting on the Wabash campaign, Clark had ordered Colonel Logan to strike again at the towns at the head of the Great Miami. With four or five hundred mounted riflemen Logan accomplished the task of destroying eight Indian villages and taking several score of prisoners.


The foregoing details form a necessary introduction to the new era in the West, heralded by the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 and the forming of the government of the Territory Northwest of the Ohio River at Marietta July 16, 1788. Until this time the question of western defense had been a problem for Pennsylvania and Virginia to solve by means of their frontier militia. Now the United States Government took up the tangled problem, by empowering President Washington, on September 29, 1789, to call out the militia of the frontier states to repel the incursions of the savages.

From the time of the organization of the Northwest Territory until 1790, the Indians of the Maumee region steadily increased