History of West Central Ohio CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION—AMERICA IN MINIATURE WHERE THE AGRARCAN WEST MEETS THE INDUSTRIAL EAST-POLITICAL INFLUENCE-TYPES OF EARLY SETTLERS. If you seek America in miniature, to locate where the Agrarian West meets the Industrial East, where Progressive faces Conservative and the hub of public opinion starts to revolve around the axle of fixed ideas, you will end your quest in West Central Ohio. These twenty-two counties contain a balance of farm and factory, of the urban and the rural, trade and transportation that is typically American. Here the main airlines, east and west, cross those running north and south. Toward here gravitate more and more the national publications which influence American opinion. Here we find a proportion of white and black blood strains and foreign and native born stocks that approach more and more with time to the national average. Politically, West Central Ohio is a national barometer better than Maine. Not since 1892 has Ohio failed to be upon the winning side in a presidential election. Here in West Central Ohio was the clearly marked line of cleavage in 1928 between the - 33 - 34 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO candidates of the Progressive Republican West, Dawes and Lowden, and the industrial East's choice, Hoover. A cleavage which foreshadowed the events of 1932. Nowhere else in the United States was the pre-convention battle fought out with the fury and rancor that prevailed in West Central Ohio, home alike of the United States Senators, Willis and Fess, who had divided in their adherence. Finally it was to these twenty-two counties that America turned in 1920 to choose her standard bearers in the far reaching political conflict of the presidency. A conflict where the nation was to decide whether it would look back vainly for the hand of a dead and buried normalcy or reach forward toward the elusive will o' the wisp of world unity. It truly symbolizes our contention of West Central Ohio being America in miniature when we see the nation standing at the crossroad of destiny, pausing to decide the future of the country and of the world and here, in this narrow compass of twenty-two counties, picking out both the rival champions, Warren Harding from the northeastern tier of counties and James M. Cox from the southwestern portion. The geographical location of each candidate was symbolical of his connections and his strength. Harding, in the northeast, candidate of the North and the Industrial East; Cox, in the southwest, standard bearer of the South and with hopes for the West, an alignment prophetic of the coming drifts of the decade. Be it past, present or future, West Central Ohio is in the heart of things American. Here astride the National Trail and where the Great Lakes and the Ohio River veer toward each other in their closest contact, where the Appalachian foothills smooth out to hold in their softened contours miniature prairies, here in the center of distribution, amid the crossroads of the air and land one well may look for the things which mirror America. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 35 By elimination one reaches the essential. An American will maintain the Western Hemisphere is the hope and refuge of the future, a world sufficient to itself. Of that hemisphere, North America by position and climate is the favored half. Of North America, the central belt has been conceded as holding the finest and widest natural base for the development of the white man. In this central belt one turns instinctively to the heart of things, to that great valley, the Mississippi, unequalled and unmatched in all the world as a granary watered and wooded par excellence. Scan that great valley and the fine balance of rainfall, fertility, forest, minerals, transportation advantages, and admirable location falls in the states of the Northwest Territory. Of these states, Ohio, mile for mile, in its compact blend of these essentials of empire, its position in the bottle neck of national transportation, is preeminent. And of all Ohio, these twenty-two counties of the Miami, the Scioto and the Maumee hold in their heaped laps the greatest hoard of natural permanent treasures ever poured from the horn of plenty. Well might it be that West Central Ohio held those springs of Indian life from which welled most of those bloody streams to drench the American border from 1774 to 1813. Here through these twenty-two counties ran the road of empire up and down which the Briton and American fenced. The first requisite for historical treatment of West Central Ohio is a detachment from and independence of the viewpoint of New England and the seaboard. Historical viewpoint tends to stand dully in early trodden trails. The tendency of human nature to paraphrase, to parrot and repeat has been especially evident in the treatment of Ohio history. New England and the New England viewpoint has dominated the approach to Western records from a large number of natural causes. Education and scholarship in America had its earliest birth and most rapid growth in New England. The inventive 36 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO and commercial genius of that people soon led to a development of printing and schools. From this to printing their own textbooks was but a step. These texts became filled with local history and were marketed with Yankee shrewdness in the more primitive and unlettered sections of the West. Ohio had in consequence several generations reared upon New England history and taught often by New England school teachers. Hence the dominant note in the Ohio schools historically speaking, was the Puritan and his performances. King Philip, Massasoit, Canonicus, the Narragansetts, the Pequots and the Mohicans, the attack upon Deerfield, the Great Swamp Fight and a host of such incidents was at tongue's end of the Buckeye youth. So slavish was the yoke of tradition, so dependent the school mind upon the Eastern text that Ohio history was almost utterly neglected and unknown or else considered of little consequence. For generations Ohio citizens in general and even the schoolmen themselves knew little of the momentous occurrences on Ohio soil, its part in the Revolution and significance of its development to the nation. One can with complete justice paraphrase Lowell's remarks to England made in the Bigelow Papers save that the point be turned against New England by Ohio, for it is equally true that if "The Lord druv down creation's spiles 'Thout no great help from the British Isles" then West Central Ohio owes but little indeed to the New Englander and the very indirect benefits of the Yankee influence have been paid a thousand fold in the credit filched in false or warped text books for a century or more. It is essential that the mind be divorced from this spurious historical claim set up and fostered by Yankee shrewdness and sectional pride. There has been an abundance of historical treatment from the outside and with the long range viewpoint. What is needed for correct balance is to regard West Central Ohio history as a growth of itself, a growth in which the Indian, the HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 37 Frenchman, the Spaniard and the British are found in their proper time sequence and the historical development wells up as a distinct stream but faintly fed by New England. The tap roots of West Central Ohio run straight south to Kentucky and farther back into Virginia and Pennsylvania. United States as a continental power was created west of the Appalachian mountains by the Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch and Virginian and Carolinian English stocks. Yankee New England was a fringe by the sea, for the first one hundred years after its settlement. Even at the time of the Revolution, Maine was a wilderness, Vermont was a frontier and so little genius did the Yankee show for pioneering that he had not conquered or domesticated his own dooryard at the time when the battle for Ohio was waged. Yankee genius was for the sea, for commerce and manufacturing. The Yankee craftsman made hogshead and vessels, fished the Bank and filled his barrels, wafted them to the West Indies, bartered his fish to the slave plantations and his barrels to the sugar trade, took his pay in molasses, winged back home to distill New England or Jamaica rum. He divided his product, part went West for furs and more went to Africa for slaves. He added human flesh to his trading stock and merchanted in the West Indies and the Southern plantation. Again he traveled the circle of rum, slaves for more rum and more slaves until the sum spelled wealth and culture. This wealth and culture he was willing to transplant westward at a price when the warfare and the pioneering was done and such ventures were profitable. The New England influence came into West Central Ohio as a secondary or tertiary one, in the guise of investors, speculators, school teachers, lawyers, preachers, doctors, peddlers and all such as seek the safe ground floor of established communities. This is discussed at length since it is intended to proceed from this New England background to consider the claims of Marietta 38 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO and the Ohio Company New Englanders as founders of Ohio. The Yankee settlers of Marietta came after the Indian had been driven back and partially cowed. The work of exploration was over, the claims to Ohio established, the destiny of the state ordained before the New Englanders set foot on its soil. If this be true of the state as a whole it is triply true of West Central Ohio, where the Marietta influence was the very indirect and lagging one of establishing forms of government rather than conquest and settlement. The doorway to West Central Ohio is Cincinnati and not Marietta. The founders are the Virginians and Kentuckians, its heroes are Clark, Boone, Kenton, Wayne, Harrison, archtypes of the American frontier. Historical consciousness develops in two ways, first by following the drift of the conquering peoples, second, by scholarship and research gathering the diverse threads of all people concerned and weaving them into the tapestry which truly depicts what was rather than what was imagined. The time has come to abandon the traditional form of local history and to view it in the larger aspects and clearer light of recent research recognizing the limited information and racial bias of earlier writers. Today a view of the West based upon the scanty sources of 1750 is inadequate. Repetition of tradition and partial information should be checked by later contacts with archives of Spain, France and England, the latter in and after the Revolutionary period which divorced America from this former contact. Knowledge of the West along the seacoast in the first half of the eighteenth century was limited largely to mouth to mouth garblings. If great planters and sound lawyers possessed libraries over which we marvel today at the variety and range, yet in general a land with but few news sheets and great illiteracy among the common people, with few institutions of learning and a general provincial culture could not be well informed concerning much which was current in foreign countries. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 39 So we find the West appeared to the English speaking seaboard as a vast, unknown, half mythical and wholly mysterious region wherein the wild Indian emerged under the urge of the fiendish French as they were then regarded. Daniel Boone has come down to us as the Columbus of the Land, largely because he found a biographer at a time when the printing press was beginning to spread its wares among a growingly literate public. Such a public can be excused for considering Boone as the first man to penetrate and make known the West. The public today cannot be excused for such a conception. France is no longer a people apart nor can its actions be dismissed as something foreign and utterly apart from the historical stream. France had penetrated and mapped the West as far as the headwaters of the Missouri and raised the French lilies among the mountains of Montana long before Boone had laid aside the habiliments of a small boy. Dr. Walker had found Cumberland Gap in 1750, full twenty-five years before Boone planted Boonesboro. The Long Hunters ranged Kentucky in 1768. James Smith as a captive had been carried over much of Ohio and parts of Kentucky in 1755 and the four succeeding years. George Croghan, Irish trader had reached the Mississippi country twenty years earlier than Boone first entered the Kentucky country. Men had traveled the full length of the Ohio on numerous occasions subsequent to the French La Salle but long prior to the coming of the English. Ohio was no terra incognito to the Pennsylvanian fur traders who had ranged its woods far and wide, certainly in the 1740's and perhaps much earlier. From reasons of business and commercial discretion these worthies might keep silent. Mainly however because they were in general a degraded and dissolute set without learning or interest above the things which attracted their savage customers; women, rum and money compassed their wants save in the case of such as Croghan who was ambitious. Mitchell's map of the West was even current among the sea- 40 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO board colonials as early as 1755, year of Braddock and twenty years before Boone. The alleged pathless woods and supposedly unknown streams of Kentucky and West Central Ohio are fairly well located thereon. The French maps of much earlier date are tolerably accurate. Bouquet in his expedition against the Ohio Indians in 1764 used a map with well defined likeness to what was actuality. Who was the first white man to visit West Central Ohio, history may never unearth, likely enough some French Jesuit with a passion for savage souls and a reward of possible martyrdom. Perhaps some English fugitive from justice or illiterate lover of wilds who has gone silent to the tongueless dust. Reputation is a matter of publicity and fame depends upon finding a scroll or tablet for inscription. West Central Ohio began to emerge from the brooding mists of the primeval and to unfold its beauties fair as a promised land when the restless French with an insatiable itch for exploration came thrusting with Gallic energy down from Canada. CHAPTER II ADVENT OF THE WHITE MAN DANGER FROM INDIANS-FUR TRADERS-FORT BUILDING-EUROPEAN INFLUENCE-NATIONAL RIVALRY, FRENCH AND ENGLISH. West Central Ohio history as a complete and authentic whole, connected unbrokenly with today is not two hundred years long. Previous to two hundred years ago, we find myths, legends, traditions, garbled tales, and isolated and partial facts. These latter facts emerge from the darkness of the unknown much as little islands of firm ground rise out the receding sea or the drained swamp. There is always in the history of a land a point and place where the islands of fact merge into the shoreland of the known and unified mainland. This point in time in West Central Ohio is 1749 and the place, Pickawillany, at the mouth of Loramie creek, branch of the Great Miami. Toward this spot at this time the French, the Virginians and the Shawnees were heading and the Miamis and the Pennsylvanians had already arrived. Pickawillany represents the long spit of fact, connected with the mainland of the known and thrust out into the sea of the vague, the indefinite and the unknown. Ohio, especially Western Ohio, must have had its period as a dark and bloody ground, such a period as Kentucky had later. The time when Ohio was a deserted or debatable land antedated that of Kentucky by a century. Ohio was the No-Man's Land of the Seventeenth Century. - 41 - 42 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO The blood lust of the Iroquois made it as unsafe for other Indians to dwell within 300 to 500 miles of the Long House as it would be for a settler to erect his cabin and rear his young on a ledge honeycombed with crevices and alive with rattlesnakes. This man-tiger breed of the Iroquois had made the French detour hundreds of miles north of the Great Lakes and follow westward the rivers of Canada. It had, from 1550 on made Ohio a lonely land full of naught but ashes, bitter memories and bloody traditions. But by 1680 to 1700, the solitudes of West Central Ohio began to echo again to the Indian's furtive footstep. It was the Miamis, edging into the Iroquois slaughter house, working in from around the shores of Lake Michigan where they were first contacted about 1650. The Miamis were above the average of Indians in intelligence, manners and were emerging from the hunter state into agriculturists. They lived in thatched huts and cultivated great stretches of cornland. Hence the alluvial flats of the Wabash, the three Miamis were ideal for them and too tempting to be resisted. Moreover these river bottoms were on the more remote side from the Iroquois. This may have been as early as 1680. The Shawnees, perhaps ejected former owners of Ohio were again gathering together their scattered fragments and working upward from the South. The French, working down Lake Huron, were stealing into the Maumee and by 1701 had placed a firm foot at Detroit. The half savage Pennsylvanian fur traders ranging the West none know how early or how far but long before the days of Boone, began to find the Ohio woods filling up with savage customers from whom they bought furs and women and left in return arms to make the Indian more fearless of the Iroquois. Virginians dreamed of great landed estates such as made Lord Fairfax the Grand Seigneur. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 43 These diverse and far gathering human elements were destined to meet and clash at Pickawillany. Why? Pickawillany was the stronghold of the Miamis and these were heads of a formidable confederacy and essential to the French and English in their plan of peaceful infiltration, although it may be doubted if the English statesmanship held such a plan, individual human ambition and enterprise in the English colonies supplying the lack. Pickawillany stood near the portage between the two main Miamis. It was astride a natural road between the lakes and the Ohio River. Almost equi-distant between the juncture of the two Ohio main tributaries, the Alleghany and Monongahela, and the Wabash, it offered the natural base for fur trade in the Ohio Country. With the friendship of the Miamis the Pennsylvania fur traders could range to the Wabash. The fort building activities of the French farther south and west had driven in the Pennsylvanian traders and they were now making a concerted fight for business along the Wabash-Miami line. This fur trade boundary began to form around 1725. Sometime in the early part of the Eighteenth Century the Shawnee, having made the Southland too hot to hold him or drawn by yearning for the ancient home fires in Ohio had sent emissaries to the Miamis, seeking permission of this rising power to enter Ohio, for the Shawnee, long dis-united had not come to his full strength and later haughty pride. So he came rather timidly back to the Ohio land, seeking alliances and, like the camel at the tent door, begged from the Miamis room just for his nose. The Shawnees, fresh from wars with the Creeks and the Seminoles, diplomatically halted at the Ohio and did no more than erect a few cabins on the Ohio side, keeping their main town on the Kentucky side opposite the mouth of the Scioto, but they had their foot in the door by 1749. So all sought the favor of the Miamis, French, English and Indians. The Iroquois, with the passage of one hundred years, 44 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO during which they had bled themselves faster than their natural increase, now felt the pressure of the French and English heavy on either flank. The Western tribes had acquired firearms. The Iroquois day of bloody domination had become rather a tradition and a claim acknowledged by courtesy. The Iroquois was beginning to do business on the prestige of his ancestors. He might eye the Miamis sourly and speak condescendingly, snarl threateningly at the Shawnee but these two latter drew in slowly to the coveted land much as two wolves might watch an ageing bull. We place our red pin on the white map of the historically unknown and tie thereon the threads of history which runs to our day. The whole skein of West Central Ohio history will weave round and outward from this point, Pickawillany. For here reach in from either side the two clutching hands of France. First the courtly Celeron de Bienville, knight of St. Louis and second, Charles de Langlade, half breed symbol of French colonial methods. Bienville, with outstretched hand seeking alliance from the Miamis and Langlade, in reserve, the knife clasped hand, coming in from behind when diplomacy had failed. Quicker than the hand of statescraft is the hand of greed. And first of all to Pickawillany came George Croghan, coarse, crude, cunning, almost illiterate Irish trader, full of energy, ambition and enterprise, fit emissary and agent for shrewd Jews like the Levy's of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and for solid Quakers such as the Shippens, they who later were to knife Benedict Arnold to his undoing. Croghan, idol of the fur traders, ranging the Western country, close mouthed were he and his backers preferring the land of their profits to remain little known; for the settler at one and the same time drove out the fur bearing animals and those who gathered them, the Indians. Hither to Pickawillany heads Christopher Gist, agent of the Virginian Cavaliers but strange to say, descended from those Round Heads, the Cromwells. Pickawillany, Indian town with squat huts, lounging bucks, entrail dragging dogs, filth and flea HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 45 infested Pickawillany and Old Britain, chief, friend of the poker faced Croghan. Clever Croghan, Irish adventurer, keen point of the Long Knife. All these were but humble folk but behind Celeron de Bienville hastening down the Ohio in 1749 is Roland Michel Barrin, Marquis de la Galissoniere, governor-general of Canada, planning a chain of French forts from the St. Lawrence down the Ohio and Mississippi and dreaming that within that iron band he will place ten thousand French peasant farmers to hold the land and multiply according to the Scriptures and for the glory of France. Behind Barrin is King Louie XV and smiling in the background is the Pompadour, light lady of leisure, spirit of the Deluge gathering to wash away the Old Regime in France. Behind the preparations of Gist are the Washingtons, the Lees, Governor Dinwiddie and behind Dinwiddie, the coarse, pugnacious German, George II of England. Behind George II is the venial Duke of Newcastle with Hanbury, London Quaker, agent of the Ohio Company, whispering in the greedy ducal ear and greasing the itching palm, no doubt for that was necessary to get things done; and things were done to the Ohio Company's liking. Sitting on the throne of the Hapsburgs, raging over the robberies of Frederick of Prussia is Maria. Theresa of Austria, meditating revenge and recovery of her lost provinces, bending the proud Hapsburg lip into a gracious smile for the wanton Pompadour who controls France. Elizabeth of Russia, watchful of all that concerns Prussia and Austria. So the thrones of Europe sit and watch the game between the France of the Pompadour and the England of the great Whig families who have placed the stodgy Germans of Hanover on the throne of the Stuarts. And the last effort of the Stuarts at Culloden in 1745 is but four years old and the fugitives, hunted by Butcher Cumberland are slipping into America, hating venomously the German Georges, rebels with a price on their 46 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO head, come to sow rebellion to the British throne in America. All this sits in the background behind Gist. A mixed and motley company are coming from afar to Pickawillany, in person or by proxy. "Hark—hark—the dogs do bark, the beggars are come to town; "Some in rags and some in tags,—and some in velvet gowns." Old Britain sits in Pickawillany waiting, not knowing all but knowing enough to speak all fair. Old Britain is full of Croghan's firewater and full of a warm glow for Briton, hence the name : Old Briton. And so they come, the emissaries of the world's greatest even though the greatest may not know they are going, they will know they have gone—later. All are coming as beggars, beggars in broadcloth or beggars in homespun, yet all are beggars of Old Britain. For the stolid savage sits at the middle of the teeter-totter in the game of statecraft and may shift his foot one way and send it down for France or rest it the other and the balance favors England. All the time the Pennsylvanian fur traders and farther back in Lancaster and Philadelphia, the sharp Jews and solid Quakers watched the Virginian cavaliers who disdained smelly furs but coveted land, land, more land, basis of rank and riches. In the womb of time Death sharpened his scythe for the Seven Years War. The world turns in a nightmare of unrest. The Pompadour beams under the Hapsburg smile. Frederick of Prussia flutes in dirty linen and smiles maliciously—and drills the Prussian Guard. Death's mouth waters over the prospect of another Punic War. Two rival greeds, fur and land, two rival colonies, Virginia and Pennsylvania, two rival nations, England and France, wend to Pickawillany. Far off Fate pulls the strings of its puppets and history begins for West Central Ohio. And the same strings lead to Europe, to India and set mannikins to dancing, armies to marching, release HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 47 the broadsides of fleets, pile up debts to crush France, bring down the fairy castle of monarchy, release the Spirit of Democracy, set the stage for Napoleon. And Pickawillany becomes like Sarajevo, a place where hidden flames burst through or like Gettysburg where two enemies groping for each other, touch fingers in the dark. Some have said the Seven Years War began at Pickawillany and some have looked elsewhere but all must admit that France wrote at Pickawillany in blood her determination to hold the Ohio Country at all hazards and to kill all who said "Nay". The wise men of England and France knew after Pickawillany that war impended in America and if the peace held it was a peace of preparations. The beginning of history in West Central Ohio was a great beginning and harbinger of a vital part in world affairs for history tends to travel the same roads and loiter round the same places. Of all these who came to Pickawillany it was Croghan, the Irish trader who came first. Milady's wants make wars. What she wants always costs money. Men strive for money to buy her favor and there is not enough to go round. Hence comes competition, pressure, riches for some and ruin for others; murmurings that grow dangerous and rulers transfer the pressure to other countries; confronted with the same problem, the foreign ruler hurls back the infiltration of his profits and the result is war. For Milady's furs the French peasant sweated out his gold, the English yeoman saw the freehold seized by the hard pressed squirarchy, the English muscled into Ireland and the dispossessed Irish came like Croghan and William Johnson to America, seeking fortune denied at home. Verily, history is wonderfully woven fabric and if we catch hold a thread we scarce know what or how far we will unravel. It was natural that Croghan the Irishman should be first to Pickawillany for the Irish, like Job's war horse smelleth the 48 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO battle from afar. Only all Croghan smelled was profit. He would, perhaps have said with the Emperor Vespasian, "The smell of every cent is sweet." We leave Croghan the humble man, the man of low degree to wait and turn to Celeron de Bienville. Celeron had with him a party of 246. His second in command was M. de Contrecoeur, he that was later to release the horde on Braddock at Ft. Duquesne, a place as yet unbuilt. Celeron left La Chine, Canada, in June, 1749. He arrived at Lake Erie, July 16, 1749. On July 29th, he entered the Alleghany River, head water of the Ohio. Celeron had come to re-assert French rights in the Ohio country which they claimed under the treaties of Ryswich, Utrecht and Aix-la-Chaepple. He was to warn the English fur traders out of the territory, learn the attitude of the Indian tribes toward the French, to try and turn them to the French interest and to take formal possession of the Ohio Country for King Louis. He was accompanied by Father Bonnecamps, chaplain of the expedition, who left a journal of its happenings. Celeron buried lead plates at the mouths of the principal rivers as he descended the Ohio; some of these have been washed out by freshets and the inscriptions preserved. At Chartier's town on the Alleghany he met English soldiers guarding 150 bales of furs enroute to Philadelphia. These traders were warned not to return and Celeron here sat down and wrote Governor Hamilton of Pennsylvania to forbid his people to trade with the Indians on the La Belle Riviere, as the French called the Ohio. Celeron's progress was marked by much palaver, doling out of drink to the Indians and burying lead plates with great formality so that he did not arrive at the mouth of the Little Miami until August 27th. The Journal called it "White River" and the Big Miami "Rock River" but the location of Pickawillany to which Celeron then proceeded fixes the two rivers. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 49 September 13, 1749, Celeron entered Pickawillany after a labored journey, the water of the Big Miami being very low at that time of year. The French dubbed Old Britain "The Young Lady" or "Demoiselle". Here Celeron attempted to get the Miamis to remove their town back to one of their ancient village sites, supposedly about Fort Wayne. This would have placed them closer to the French at Detroit and taken them away from contact with the Pennsylvanians. Old Britain and the Barrel, a companion chief answered diplomatically agreeing to migrate back to the Maumee in the spring and vowing they spoke "Not from the end of their lips but from the bottom of their hearts." They even agreed to deal fairly with the Shawnees who had handled Celeron insultingly at the mouth of the Scioto. This offer would indicate the Miamis felt they had influence with or over the Shawnees. The latter at all times bore a reputation as fierce, untractable people among the French and the other Indian tribes. September 20, Celeron started for the Lakes, well satisfied with his mission only to be disillusioned by Cold Foot, a Miami chief on the Maumee who told him "I hope I am deceived but I am sufficiently attached to the interests of the French to say the Demoiselle is a liar. It is the source of all my grief to be the only one who loves you and to see all the nations of the south let loose against the French." If Cold Foot is to be believed and Celeron's reception on the Ohio had substantiated the fact of English popularity, then George Croghan must be given the major credit for this standing of the English. If this standing of the French and English among the Indians was reversed in the next few years it was due to the Virginians and their land hunger rather than to the Pennsylvanians and the fur trade, the latter being a benefit to the Indians. It may be too much to say but there is room for surmising that the youthful, inexperienced Washington in his contact with the tribes and his attempting to handle the Indians like soldiers undid