This was the
first step in his march towards the Wabash. An army! Do not smile.
Fewer than two hundred men, it is true, answered the roll-call,
when Father Gibault lifted the Cross and blessed them; but every
name told off by the company sergeants belonged to a hero, and
every voice making response struck a full note in the chorus of
freedom's morning song.
It was an army, small indeed, but yet an army; even though so
rudely equipped that, could we now see it before us, we might
wonder of what use it could possibly be in a military way.
We should nevertheless hardly expect that a hundred and seventy of
our best men, even if furnished with the latest and most deadly
engines of destruction, could do what those pioneers cheerfully
undertook and gloriously accomplished in the savage wilderness
which was to be the great central area of the United States of
America.
We look back with a shiver of awe at the three hundred Spartans
for whom Simonides composed his matchless epitaph. They wrought
and died gloriously; that was Greek. The one hundred and seventy
men, who, led by the backwoodsman, Clark, made conquest of an
empire's area for freedom in the west, wrought and lived
gloriously; that was American. It is well to bear in mind this
distinction by which our civilization separates itself from that
of old times.
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