George Rogers Clark, Soldier in the West

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To Americans the name of George Rogers Clark is legendary. It is synonymous with settlement on the Ohio, ad ventures in the Kentucky wilderness, conquest of the frontier land of Illinois, and the winning of the West for a new nation. Yet what many Americans do not know, and what is so ably presented in this book, is the personality and life story of the man behind these conquests.

As a boy Clark looked with longing over the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia toward the challenge of unknown territory. The story of his youth, as Walter Havighurst portrays it, is a story of unconscious preparation for a lifetime of conquest. Farming, surveying, or tramping the Virginia woods, Clark developed the strength and independence that would later aid him in his journey through the wilderness to the Mississippi. And at the age of twenty lean and ready he set out for the Forks of the Ohio,

This book follows Clark on many dangerous and important missions, missions that took him to the shores of the Mongongahela, into the rich lands of Kentucky and from there to the wilderness of Illinois. Mr. Havighurst tells of the first settlement on the Ohio and of Clark's march from Kentucky back to Virginia over 500 miles of disputed country to obtain the gunpowder needed before they could march on the British at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes.

Here too is the story of the famous "year of the bloody sevens" (1777), when Clark took a desperate and audacious gamble and with only 176 men braved the flooded bottom lands of Ohio to take the fort of Vincennes and gain control of the Illinois country. The reader is with Clark on his march through the great woods, in besieged stockades, in council and warfare with the Wabash, the Shawnees, and the Mingos, and in victory over the redcoats. To the end of his life Clark remained a supreme example of the courage and achievement of America's frontiersmen.

Walter Havighurst is a noted authority on the Old Northwest, which he has studied and written about for twenty years. He has followed Clark's routs, over the Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio, all the way from Virginia to the Mississippi, and is the author of Upper Mississippi, Land of Promise, and Signature of Time.

—from the dust jacket

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