power, and the worst people, both Americans and Creoles, practised every kind of rascality with impunity.  All decent men joined in clamoring for Clark’s return; but it was impossible for him to come back.  The freshets and the maladministration combined to produce a dearth, almost a famine, in the land.  The evils were felt most severely in Vincennes, where Helm, the captain of the post, though a brave and capable man, was utterly unable to procure supplies of any kind.  He did not hear of Clark’s success against Piqua and Chillicothe until October.

Then he wrote to one of the officers at the Falls, saying that he was “sitting by the fire with a piece of lightwood and two ribs of an old buffloe, which is all the meat we have seen this many days.  I congratulate your success against the Shawanohs, but there’s never doubts where that brave Col.  Clark commands; we well know the loss of him in Illinois....  Excuse Haste as the Lightwood’s Just out and mouth watering for part of the two ribs.” [Footnote:  Calendar of Va.  State Papers, I., pp. 380, 382, 383, Oct. 24-29, 1780.]

    La Balme’s Expedition.

In the fall of 1780 a Frenchman, named la Balme, led an expedition composed purely of Creoles against Detroit.  He believed that he could win over the French at that place to his side, and thus capture the fort as Clark had captured Vincennes.  He raised some fifty volunteers round Cahokia and Kaskaskia, perhaps as many more on the Wabash, and marched to the Maumee River.  Here he stopped to plunder some British traders; and in November the neighboring Indians fell on his camp, killed him and thirty or forty of his men, and scattered the rest. [Footnote:  Haldimand MSS.  De Peyster to Haldimand, Nov. 16, 1780.] His march had been so quick and unexpected that it rendered the British very uneasy, and they were much rejoiced at his discomfiture and death.

The following year a new element of confusion was added.  In 1779 Spain declared war on Great Britain.  The Spanish commandant at New Orleans was Don Bernard de Galvez, one of the very few strikingly able men Spain has sent to the western hemisphere during the past two centuries.  He was bold, resolute, and ambitious; there is reason to believe that at one time he meditated a separation from Spain, the establishment of a Spanish-American empire, and the founding of a new imperial house.  However this may be, he threw himself heart and soul into the war against Britain; and attacked British West Florida with a fiery energy worthy of Wolfe or Montcalm.  He favored the Americans; but it was patent to all that he favored them only the better to harass the British. [Footnote:  State Department MSS., No. 50, p. 109.]