Thus empowered and provided with money for the expenses of the expedition Clark, with characteristic energy, proceeded to the execution of his plans. His first base of operations was a western settlement on the Monongahela River some distance above Pittsburg, known as Red Stone or Red Stone Old Fort. His officers were appointed and commissioned to raise recruits in western Pennsylvania, Virginia, Carolina and the Kentucky country, and in tis preliminary business the first serious difficulty developed. It must be remembered that the real reason for this recruiting was not divulged. Secrecy, be it repeated, was essential to success, and the instructions made public by Governor Henry conveyed the impression that the force to be raised was for the protection of Kentucky. The proposition to draw off from other parts of the frontier "for the defense of a few detached inhabitants who had better be removed" met with an opposition that threatened to nip the whole scheme in the bud and that probably would have stopped short a less determined leader. As Clark himself expressed it: "Many leading men in the frontiers ... combined and did everything that lay in their power to stop the men that had enlisted, and set the whole frontier in an uproar, even condescended to harbor and protect those that deserted. I found my case desperate - the longer I remained the worse it was." Out of the men that Captains Joseph Bowman and Leonard Helm had succeeded in recruiting "two-thirds of them was stopped," we are told, those that were left numbering about one hundred and fifty. Clark, however, was not to be thwarted, and equipping himself wit boats and supplies at Pittsburg he put down river with his little force, accompanied by several adventurous families from the Pennsylvania country, borrowing hope from the information sent him that one of his recruiting officers, Major William Smith, would join him at the falls of the Ohio with nearly two hundred men, from the Holston River country, in what is now eastern Tennessee. But he was doomed to bitter disappointment - a pert of one company was all that ever appeared of Major Smith's two hundred men.