Believing themselves outside the pale of eastern protection, the western
people entertained various projects for self-preservation. George
Rogers Clark, whose daring Virginia expedition into the Illinois country
had gained him fame in the Revolutionary days, placed himself at the
head of a volunteer company which called itself the "Wabash regiment,"
and had been recruited in Kentucky for an expedition against the Shawnee
Indians. Clark had degenerated through intemperance into a kind of
border freebooter. Turning his troops from the original purpose, he
seized the goods of the Spanish traders at Post Vincennes as a
retaliation upon the Spanish, and prepared to descend upon New Orleans.
Congress was compelled to take strong measures for disbanding his
followers and making amends to Spain. A short time after, another
Kentuckian was at Vincennes organising men to drive out the Spanish
and make a settlement at Natchez, presumably inside the limits of
Georgia. "Ireland is a free country to what this will be when its
navigation is entirely shut," he wrote to the governor of Georgia in
unfolding his scheme. An emissary was sent through the Illinois French
settlements to describe the Spanish outrages on the lower Mississippi.
Seditious papers were circulating in Kentucky and in the revolutionary
State of Franklin. "In case we are not countenanced," said one of these
documents, "and succoured by the United States, our allegiance will
be thrown off and some other power applied to. Great Britain stands
ready with open arms to receive and support us." One adventurer assured
Gardoqui that fifty thousand men would be in arms in the western country
to get their commercial rights.

Even a more efficient government than a Confederation would have
experienced difficulty in overcoming these decentralising effects of
the Alleghany Mountains, before improved methods of transportation had
annihilated the barrier. The people along the Atlantic Ocean and those