George Rogers Clark crossed the Ohio in the summer of 1778 with fewer than 175 Virginia State troops and a commission from Governor Patrick Henry to take the British posts in the Illinois country. Kaskaskia fell on the evening of July 4 — the Americans walking unopposed through the gate of the old French fort while the village slept — and Cahokia and the smaller posts came in over the following days, none of them firing a shot in defense. The French Canadian inhabitants, persuaded by Father Pierre Gibault that France and the new American republic were now allies, came over without resistance and began supplying Clark's regiment with bread and corn. When Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton retook Vincennes that December, Clark answered with the 180-mile winter march back across the flooded Wabash bottoms and the recapture of Fort Sackville on February 25, 1779 — the campaign that gave him the title Conqueror of the Old Northwest and the Indian-name reputation of the Long Knives.

This W. Britain figure shows an Illinois Regiment soldier kneeling at the ready: musket grounded across his right knee with the muzzle slanted forward and the bayonet fixed, left hand on the forestock, eyes scanning across the line of advance. He wears the regiment's nearest approach to uniform order — a dark blue regimental coat with the white cross-belts of a state regular, white breeches and stockings, plain black shoes, and a black tricorne pulled low. A powder horn rides at the left hip in place of a regulation cartridge box, and the long Pennsylvania or Virginia rifle that the Kentucky men favored has given way here to a smoothbore musket suited to fixed-bayonet work. He waits at the ready in the line his comrades hold standing firing and kneeling firing on either flank — the frontier-state equivalent of the Continental Line 1st American Regiment kneeling alert holding the regular line in the same posture.

Model: 16085 / W. Britain 1/30 (60mm) / matte finish / 1 piece set