> In the American Revolutionary War, Virginia frontiersman George Rogers Clark was able to capture key British forts in the summer of 1778. When General Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, retook Vincennes, Clark returned in a surprise winter march in February 1779 and captured Hamilton himself.
Because the British ceded the entire Northwest Territory to the United States in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, some historians have credited Clark with nearly doubling the size of the original thirteen colonies by seizing control of the Illinois country during the war.