Vincennes

Clark took the Illinois Country in 1778 without a battle, on the news that France had joined the war and a priest who swung a town to the American oath. Then the British governor of Detroit marched 600 miles in winter and took Vincennes back, dismissed most of his men for the season, and settled in to wait for spring, while one trader carried the news that changed Clark's mind.

A hundred and seventy men, eighteen days, the last week wading the flooded Wabash bottoms with the water at the chest and the food gone. Then a bluff with too many flags, riflemen firing through the fort's gunports, and four captured warriors tomahawked before the gate so the watching garrison and the watching nations would learn what British protection was worth.

A salute that killed the man it honored, a British governor sent east to a Virginia cell on a charge his jailers could not prove, a frontier war that got worse, and a granite memorial built two centuries later to a conquest the record will not quite support.