GEORGE ROGERS CLARK

An elegiac portrait of a favorite frontiersman which transmutes the vision and the reality of westward expansion in heroic terms. Born on a Virginia farmstead, the second of ten children, George Rogers Clark left home at nineteen- with the ""birth-right of distance and danger""- to become a woodsman and a wanderer. Kentucky was his first domain, and as the representative of the settlers there he secured its political existence through Patrick Henry. And later, again to Henry, he proposed the conquest of all western country, asked for an army of 500 but was only accorded 175 men who formed the expedition which was to take the British-held settlements in Illinois. The threat of England's General Hamilton forced a bold to desperate enterprise, and he retook Vincennes from Hamilton- against great odds, although his hopes of taking Detroit were never backed or realized....A professional rather than a personal biography, this limns the stature and the historical significance of the man and matches his spacious dream of conquest. Highly suitable for a younger audience as well.