And so the Iroquois came to hate the French, especially after their first encounter with them on the shores of Lake Champlain when the white captain, Champlain, fired a horrid arquebus which killed two chieftains and wounded another, and liked to have scared the whole Indian army to death. This hatred was augmented as the French made friends with the Algonquin tribes of the lower St. Lawrence, who, having fled from before the Iroquois warriors like dust before the wind, now, in revenge, piloted the French up the Ottawa and showed them a way to enter the Great Lakes of the Iroquois by the back door, Georgian Bay. Once acquainted with the five Great Lakes, the French were even less satisfied than before, and down into the hunting-grounds of the Iroquois they plunged in search of a great river and a sea which would lead to China. Already they had named the portage around one of the St. Lawrence rapids La Chine, believing that the river led “to China”—a country of which the farthest western nations, the fierce Chippewas and Dacotahs, even, had never heard!
As the eighteenth century grew older, the Iroquois became too busy with affairs of war and diplomacy and trade to come each year to their western hunting-grounds and guard them with the ancient jealousy. Situated as they were between the French and English settlements they found a neutral rôle difficult to maintain and they became fitfully allied now with the Albany, now with the Quebec governments, as each struggled to gain possession of the great fur trade which was controlled by the Six Nations who claimed to control the Ottawa, St. Lawrence, and all the New York rivers.
But this hunting-ground was too delightful a land to remain long unoccupied. Had Providence willed that these forests in and west of the Appalachian mountain system should have continued to be unoccupied until the white man came to possess it, many of the darkest pages of American history would never have been written. But the reverse of this happened. Not only was it filled with Indians, but there came to it from far distant homes, as if chosen by fate, three of the most desperate Indian nations on the continent, each having been made ready, seemingly, by long years of oppression and tyranny, for the bloody work of holding this West from the white man. The three nations found by the first explorers in the abandoned hunting-grounds of the Iroquois had been fugitives on the face of the earth for half a century, bandied about between the stronger confederacies like outcasts, denied refuge everywhere, pursued, persecuted, half destroyed. The story of any one of them is the story of the other two—a sad, desperate tale.
These nations were the Shawanese, Delawares, and Wyandots. The centers of population which they formed were on the Scioto, Muskingum, and Sandusky rivers, respectively. And, with the fierce Miamis and the remnants of the Iroquois, these tribes fought the longest and most successful war ever waged by the red race in the history of the continent. From their lairs on the Allegheny, Scioto, and Muskingum they defied the white man for half a century, triumphing at Braddock’s and St. Clair’s defeats, the greatest victories over the white man ever achieved by the red.
The first of these nations to enter the old hunting-ground of the Iroquois was the Wyandot. Their home was about Sandusky Bay, and along the shores of the Sandusky river. Originally the Wyandots dwelt on the upper St. Lawrence, and were neighbors of the Seneca tribe of the Six Nations. As the result of a quarrel over a maiden, as legend has it, but more likely as result of Iroquois conquest, the Wyandots were driven from their homes, vanishing westward into the land of the Hurons, who lived by the lake which bore their name. Here the brave Jesuit missionaries found them, where they were known as the Tobacco Nation. The confederation of the Iroquois as the Six Nations sounded the doom of the Hurons, and with the Senecas at the head of the confederacy, only ruin stared the fugitive Wyandots in the face. By the beginning of the eighteenth century they had again fled westward, hopelessly seeking a new refuge. Some of the nation continued journeying even beyond the Sioux and Dacotahs to the “Back-bone of the World,” as they called the Rocky Mountains. There, tradition states, they found wanderers like themselves, who spoke a familiar language—Wyandots who had come hither long before to escape the revengeful Senecas! But the majority of the nation built great rafts and set float on the Detroit river. This was a reckless alternative to choose, but it brought the persecuted nation to their long-sought place of refuge. As they passed the present site of Detroit they saw with amazement an array of white tents and soldiers dressed in white, keeping watch. The Wyandots had found the French building a fort, and fear of the Senecas vanished. On the shores of neighboring Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie the Wyandots built their fires, and the relations between them and the French were most cordial. The year of this memorable Wyandot hegira is given as 1701, which, fortunately, corresponds with the founding of Detroit.
When Mad Anthony Wayne was waging his last campaign against the western Indians in 1794, he once summoned to him a knowing frontiersman and asked him if he could not capture an Indian in order to get some information concerning the enemy.
“Can you not capture one near Sandusky?” asked the general, as the man hesitated.
“No, not Sandusky,” was the ready reply.
“And why not at Sandusky?”
“There are only Wyandots at Sandusky.”