In temperament, customs, habits and general character the two elements had little in common. The French are pictured as indolent, shiftless and easy-going, given to vivacity, noise and merrymaking, their very manner of apportioning their lands being an index to their social nature, for the long, narrow tracts they farmed were so shaped as to bring their houses near together. The Americans, on the other hand, were businesslike and thrifty, with an eye to seizing advantages, and when the two classes came into industrial competition the incompetent Frenchman gradually went to the wall and much of his land that had formerly yielded him some sort of a living went to his competitor at prices little more than nominal. Before this turn of affairs, however, they had serious cause of complaint, as is shown by a letter, signed by sixteen of the leading citizens of Vincennes and addressed to the Governor of Virginia in 1781. This letter affirms "horrible treatment" from the Virginia troops, particularly after Colonel Clark left the town, the charge being that they were obliged to accept for their goods and food supplies depreciated Continental money at coin value; that their cattle and hogs were killed in the fields, their flour and corn taken forcibly, and various other wrongs perpetrated (George Rogers Clark Papers, pp. 430).

These summary proceedings might have been accounted for, in part, by the exigencies of war, for the capture of Vincennes was by no means the end of military operations in the Northwest, but they also indicate that the rude frontiersman who performed the rough work of conquest that has been described, was not given to gentleness, nor, perhaps, to strict justice. In short, the less robust exiles were not fitted to cope with him and with those who followed him as permanent citizens, and thus the story of French life on Indiana soil has in it something of tragedy.