Why his Efforts were Baffled.

At last, Clark was empowered to raise the men he wished, and he passed and repassed from Fort Pitt to the Falls of the Ohio and thence to the Illinois in the vain effort to get troops.  The inertness and shortsightedness of the frontiersmen, above all the exhaustion of the States, and their timid selfishness and inability to enforce their commands, baffled all of Clark’s efforts.  In his letters to Washington he bitterly laments his enforced dependence upon “persuasive arguments to draw the inhabitants of the country into the field.” [Footnote:  State Department MSS.  Letters to Washington, Vol. 49, p. 235, May 21, 1781.  The entire history of the western operations shows the harm done by the weak and divided system of government that obtained at the time of the Revolution, and emphasizes our good fortune in replacing it by a strong and permanent Union.] The Kentuckians were anxious to do all in their power, but of course only a comparatively small number could be spared for so long a campaign from their scattered stockades.  Around Pittsburg, where he hoped to raise the bulk of his forces, the frontiersmen were split into little factions by their petty local rivalries, the envy their leaders felt of Clark himself, and the never-ending jealousies and bickerings between the Virginians and Pennsylvanians. [Footnote:  Calendar of Virginia State Papers, I., pp. 502, 597, etc.; II., pp. 108, 116, 264, 345.  The Kentuckians were far more eager for action than the Pennsylvanians.]

The fort at the Falls, where Clark already had some troops, was appointed as a gathering-place for the different detachments that were to join him; but from one cause or another, all save one or two failed to appear.  Most of them did not even start, and one body of Pennsylvanians that did go met with an untoward fate.  This was a party of a hundred Westmoreland men under their county-lieutenant, Col.  Archibald Loughry.  They started down the Ohio in flat-boats, but having landed on a sand bar to butcher and cook a buffalo that they had killed, they were surprised by an equal number of Indians under Joseph Brant, and being huddled together, were all slain or captured with small loss to their assailants. [Footnote:  At Loughry’s Creek, some ten miles below the mouth of the Miami, on August 24, 1781.  Diary of Captain Isaac Anderson, quoted in “Indiana Hist.  Soc.  Pamphlets, No. 4,” by Charles Martindale, Indianapolis, 1888.  Collins, whose accuracy by no means equals his thirst for pure detail, puts this occurrence just a year too late.  Brant’s force was part of a body of several hundred Indians gathered to resist Clark.] Many of the prisoners, including Loughry himself, were afterwards murdered in cold blood by the Indians.

    Fighting on the Frontier.