A MARCH THROUGH COLD WATER On the fifth day of February, 1779, Colonel George Rogers Clark led an army across the Kaskaskia River and camped.

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.