THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS. 19 



into the yet unbroken wilds where the game 

 dwelt and the red tribes marched forever to 

 war and hunting. Their untamable souls ever 

 found something congenial and beyond meas- 

 ure attractive in the lawless freedom of the 

 lives of the very savages against whom they 

 warred so bitterly. 



Step by step, often leap by leap, the fron- 

 tier of settlement was pushed westward ; and 

 ever from before its advance fled the warrior 

 tribes of the red men and the scarcely less 

 intractable array of white Indian fighters 

 and game hunters. When the Revolution- 

 ary war was at its height, George Rogers 

 Clarke, himself a mighty hunter of the old 

 backwoods type, led his handful of hunter- 

 soldiers to the conquest of the French towns 

 of the Illinois. This was but one of the many 

 notable feats of arms performed by the wild 

 soldiery of the backwoods. Clad in their 

 fringed and tasselled hunting shirts of buck- 

 skin or homespun, with coonskin caps and 

 deer-hide leggings and moccasins, with toma- 

 hawk and scalping knife thrust into their 

 bead-worked belts, and long rifles in hand, 

 they fought battle after battle of the most 

 bloody character, both against the Indians, 

 as at the Great Kanawha, at the Fallen 

 Timbers, and at Tippecanoe, and against more 

 civilized foes, as at King's Mountain, New 

 Orleans, and the River Thames. 



Soon after the beginning of the present 

 century Louisiana fell into our hands, and the 

 most daring hunters and explorers pushed 

 through the forests of the Mississippi valley 

 to the great plains, steered across these vast 



