Sometimes the trouble was of a religious nature.  The priest at Vincennes, for instance, bitterly assailed the priest at Cahokia, because he married a Catholic to a Protestant; while all the people of the Cahokia church stoutly supported their pastor in what he had done. [Footnote:  Do., p. 85.] This Catholic priest was Clark’s old friend Gibault.  He was suffering from poverty, due to his loyal friendship to the Americans; for he had advanced Clark’s troops both goods and peltries, for which he had never received payment.  In a petition to Congress he showed how this failure to repay him had reduced him to want, and had forced him to sell his two slaves, who otherwise would have kept and tended him in his old age. [Footnote:  American State Papers, Public Lands, I., Gibault’s Memorial, May I, 1790.]

The Federal General Harmar, in the fall of 1787, took formal possession, in person, of Vincennes and the Illinois towns; and he commented upon the good behavior of the Creoles, and their respect for the United States Government, and laid stress upon the fact that they were entirely unacquainted with what the Americans called liberty, and could best be governed in the manner to which they were accustomed—­“by a commandant with a few troops.” [Footnote:  St. Clair Papers, Harmar’s Letters, August 7th and November 24th, 1787.]

    Contrast between the French and Americans.

The American pioneers, on the contrary, were of all people the least suited to be governed by a commandant with troops.  They were much better stuff out of which to make a free, self-governing nation, and they were much better able to hold their own in the world, and to shape their own destiny; but they were far less pleasant people to govern.  To this day the very virtues of the pioneers—­not to speak of their faults—­make it almost impossible for them to get on with an ordinary army officer, accustomed as he is to rule absolutely, though justly and with a sort of severe kindness.  Army officers on the frontier—­especially when put in charge of Indian reservations or of French or Spanish communities—­have almost always been more or less at swords-points with the stubborn, cross-grained pioneers.  The borderers are usually as suspicious as they are independent, and their self-sufficiency and self-reliance often degenerate into mere lawlessness and defiance of all restraint.

    The Regular Officers Side with the French against the Americans.

The Federal officers in the backwoods north of the Ohio got on badly with the backwoodsmen.  Harmar took the side of the French Creoles, and warmly denounced the acts of the frontiersmen who had come in among them. [Footnote:  State Dept.  MSS., No. 150, vol. ii., Harmar to Le Grasse and Busseron, June 29, 1787.] In his letter to the Creoles he alluded to Clark’s Vincennes garrison as “a set of lawless banditti,” and explained that his own troops were regulars, who would treat with justice