This northwestern land lay between the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the
Great Lakes. It now constitutes five of our large States and part of a
sixth. But when independence was declared it was quite as much a foreign
territory, considered from the standpoint of the old thirteen colonies,
as Florida or Canada; the difference was that, whereas during the war we
failed in our attempts to conquer Florida and Canada, we succeeded in
conquering the Northwest. The Northwest formed no part of our country as
it originally stood; it had no portion in the declaration of
independence. It did not revolt; it was conquered. Its inhabitants, at
the outset of the Revolution, no more sympathized with us, and felt no
greater inclination to share our fate, than did their kinsmen in Quebec
or the Spaniards in St. Augustine. We made our first important conquest
during the Revolution itself,--beginning thus early what was to be our
distinguishing work for the next seventy years.

These French settlements, which had been founded about the beginning of
the century, when the English still clung to the estuaries of the
seaboard, were grouped in three clusters, separated by hundreds of miles
of wilderness. One of these clusters, containing something like a third
of the total population, was at the straits, around Detroit.[9] It was
the seat of the British power in that section, and remained in British
hands for twenty years after we had become a nation.

The other two were linked together by their subsequent history, and it
is only with them that we have to deal. The village of Vincennes lay on
the eastern bank of the Wabash, with two or three smaller villages
tributary to it in the country round about; and to the west, beside the
Mississippi, far above where it is joined by the Ohio, lay the so-called
Illinois towns, the villages of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, with between them
the little settlements of Prairie du Rocher and St. Philip.[10]