Swift on the heels of this determination, preparations were made for the expedition. Clark's own men were with him heartily and the French rallied enthusiastically to his support and on the fifty of February, just one week after the arrival of Vigo with his information, one hundred and seventy men left Kaskaskia to march, as Clark describes it, "eighty leagues through a drowned country in the depths of winter," and without even tents to protect them from the winter weather. As an auxiliary to the campaign a Mississippi bateau, or large boat, was laden with army supplies, manned with forty-six men and sent by way of the Mississippi, Ohio and Wabash to a point below Vincennes, to connect with the land force when it should reach there.