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AMERICAN PORTAGES

sentations were the first to direct the attention of the French to the regions south and west of Lake Erie."[1]

Perhaps the most historic campaign in which the Wabash route played a part was Hamilton's journey across it in 1778 when he went to the recapture of Vincennes.[2] From the standpoint of this present study this campaign is of particular interest, as it was one of the exceedingly few instances in which a military movement was made by water on the lesser rivers of the West. It is remarkable that though the two important posts west of the Alleghenies, Detroit and Pittsburg, were through many years, in the possession of bitter enemies, neither one ever conquered or hardly attempted to conquer the other. A hundred plans for the capture of Detroit were conceived in Fort Pitt, and many a commander of Fort Detroit was determined to subdue Fort Pitt.[3] Yet it can almost be said that

  1. Id., vol. i, pp. 377–78; Fiske's Discovery of America, vol. ii, p. 534.
  2. Historic Highways of America, vol. vi, p. 164.
  3. For references to proposed routes by land and water against Fort Detroit and Fort Pitt see Butterfield's Washington–Irvine Correspondence, pp. 92, 110, 118,