fully considered—for the story of the route is almost the whole story of the campaign.
Crossing the Kaskaskia River February 5, 1779, Clark's army lay three miles from Kaskaskia, for two days, "to tighten belts."[1] It is impossible to determine how much was known of their path onward. To many it had been well known for nearly a century—an old watershed prairie route marked out by the buffalo and followed by missionaries—the Appian Way of Illinois. The difficulty in studying this route, it should be stated at once, arises from the fact that while Kaskaskia was formerly the metropolis of western Illinois, the rise of St. Louis across the Mississippi had the effect of altering previously traveled routes. What has been ever known as the St. Louis Trace, coursing across Illinois from Vincennes to the Mississippi, became in the nineteenth century what the old Kaskaskia Trace had been in the eighteenth century, just as what had been the "Old Massac Road" became known as the St. Louis-
- ↑ Probably at "a small branch about three miles from Kaskaskia" mentioned by Clark in his letter to Mason (English's Conquest of the Northwest, vol. i, p. 430).
