Pierre Grimard's dream was to leave his boyhood home in France and voyage to America. He longed to begin a new life, business, and family in the French settlements of the faraway frontier in the Illinois country. Ten years later it seemed that Pierre had fulfilled every one of his dreams. He had a beautiful, devoted wife, a home full of children, and a thriving business in the French trading outpost at Vincennes on the Wabash River. Then in the winter of 1778 this tiny, primitive village became the epicenter of a bloody struggle between the powerful armies of Great Britain and the rebels of the American Revolution. Colonel George Rogers Clark of Virginia and his ragtag army of frontier riflemen, the Long Knives, occupied Vincennes and its fort in an effort to eliminate the British influence on the Native Americans in the Northwest. But the British would soon return . and with a vengeance.

Frenchmen and Long Knives is the unique story of a small band of French settlers and frontiersmen who swore an oath to Virginia and chose to become Patriots and soldiers in the struggle to give birth to a new nation.