Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 8).djvu/74

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70
MILITARY ROADS

Wherever this old trace may be found it speaks of Clark and Clark only. All the story of its other days is forgotten for those hard fifteen during which that daring youth drew his comrades "insensibly" onward, amid jests and raillery, to the British stronghold from which thousands of savages had been urged to war upon the feeble Kentucky stations. Boone's Wilderness Road meant much, but if Fort Sackville and the other Wabash Valley centers had been a trifle more potent than they were, it would have become as overgrown as was Braddock's Road when Forbes marched to Fort Duquesne three years after Braddock. The two posts at the termini of the Vincennes Trace, and the dark councils of their commanders, were a more serious menace to Kentucky's safety than all the redskins north of the Ohio River. It was the British-fed, British-armed, and British-led Indians that made possible the dream of a reconquest of Kentucky.

After George Rogers Clark led his men over that narrow, winding trace, through flooded Grand Cote Prairie and over the