The Big Knives -- the twentieth and last book by Bruce Lancaster, whose novels and histories have done so much to illuminate the American past -- is a novel revolving around the heroic figure of George Rogers Clark. More than any other man Clark opened up what we know as the Middle West for the young American republic. In 1778, at the age of twenty-five, Clark led a force of less than 200 Viriginians, Kentuckians, and, later, French frontiersmen, to capture the settlements of Illinois from British occupation. Supplied from British headquarters in Detroit, the occupied settlements had become rallying points for savage Indian raids on American outposts in Kentucky and Virginia. "We got to stop the Indians somehow," one Kentuckian explains to a recruit. "If not, folks won't stay in Kentucky or western Virginia or Pennsylvania. The frontier'll shrink and shrink till one day you'll see palisades around Philadelphia and Williamsburg and then what'll happen to our armies on the coast? What'll happen to independence?" The Indians called Clark Gitchi Mokoman ("The Big Knife"), and they had reason to respect him. Armed only with some powder and ball, a little money, and vague instructions from Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia, young Clark organized the Illinois Detachment of the Western American Army or, as one buckskinned volunteer exclaimed: "One hundred seventy-seven of us, add Clark, and that makes it two hundred seventy-seven." The story of Clark's bluffing, diplomacy and bold generalship is interwoven with that of young Markham Cape, a merchant-adventurer trying to make his way back to Boston from New Orleans. - Jacket flap.