The animal life of the forests one can fancy, perhaps, with more accuracy than any other characteristic, for the deer and turkey, the wolf and buffalo of that day have their antitypes in ours. And yet here one might fall short, for few recall the vast flocks of pigeons that swarmed above the primeval forest, even darkening the heavens as though a cloud were passing, and blighting the trees in which they spent a night. Harris, an early Western traveler, has left record that from a single hollow tree several wagon loads of feathers have been extracted.
The history of this West is a long history of war, from the earliest days even to our own century. This territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi is one of the greatest battle-fields in the world. It is certainly the oldest and most renowned in our America. The first European to enter it looked with wondering eyes upon the monstrous earthen forts of a prehistoric race whom we have loosely named from the relics they left behind, the mound-builders. Of this race of early Indians the later red men knew nothing, save what the legends handed down by their fathers told of a race of giants which was driven out of the Central West, and sent flying down the Ohio and Mississippi to reappear no more in human history. Antiquarians find that these forts and mausoleums reveal little in addition to the bloody story told by crude implements of war, of
“Old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago.”
In certain instances, great piles of human bones are found at strategic revetment angles where heaviest attack was made and stoutest resistance encountered. Here bones are sometimes found pierced by death-dealing arrow-heads. What power hurled the flints of these warriors of prehistoric days? The Indian legend, that they were giants in strength, has been easily believed. Nowhere else on the continent are found such forts as were built by these ancient defenders of the Central West.
Throughout the eighteenth century this territory was a continual battle-ground. To it, both France and England, in turn, clung with equal determination, and both tried the foolish experiment of attempting to win it back, when once it was lost, by means of the Indians who made it their lair.
When the first explorers entered the West, early in the eighteenth century, it was found to be the princely hunting-ground of the Iroquois, better known as the Six Nations. Of all American Indians the Iroquois were ever preëminent, invincible. The proud races of the furthest south had felt the weight of their tomahawks and the nations that camped about the shores of Lake St. John “kept their sentinels pushed well southward in dread of their fierce invasion.” As conquerors of half a continent, the choicest hunting-grounds were theirs, and so the forests, divided by the Oyo, Ohio, which took its rise in the Iroquois home-land south of Lake Ontario, was the nation’s choice.
Still, during Iroquois sovereignty over the Central West, it is not probable that they alone knew of the treasures of turkey, buffalo, and pike which the land and its streams contained. In the Far West the Iroquois left the Miami nation undisturbed in their old home between the Miami and Wabash. Ottawas, “traders” from the north, who had never built a fire beside more splendid streams than the Central West contained, were at times vagrant, frightened visitors to the lands between the great lakes and the Oyo. Other scattered remnants of Indian nations are rumored to have built fires in the hunting-ground of the Iroquois; if so, they hid the charred embers of their camp fires in the leaves, to obliterate all proofs of their sly incursions.
Ever and anon, from the Iroquois home-land, came great armies into the West in search of game. Launching their painted canoes on the headwaters of the Oyo (now the Allegheny and Ohio), they came down with the flood-tides of the spring and fall and scattered into all the rivers of the forest—the Kanawha, Muskingum, Scioto, Kentucky, Miami, and Wabash. Other canoes came up Lake Ontario to Lake Erie and passed up the Cuyahoga and down the Muskingum, or up the Sandusky and down the Scioto, or up the Miami-of-the-Lakes and down the Wabash. Then were the forests filled with shouting, and a hundred great fires illuminated the primeval shadows. After the hunters came the warriors in brightly colored canoes, their paddles sweeping in perfect unison. And woe to the arrogant southern nation whose annual tribute had failed to come! Down to the south the warriors sped, to return with terrible proofs of their prowess, leaving upon the rocks in the rivers haughty symbols of their victories.
But, at last, the supremacy of the arrogant Six Nations was challenged, and the territory over which they were masters began to grow smaller instead of greater. The white men came to America. Their “new” empires were being erected on the continent. “New Spain” arose to the south; “New Sweden” was spoken of, and “New Scotland,” “New Hampshire,” and “New Amsterdam;” “New England” was heard of between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean, and “New France” was founded amid the Canadian snows, with its capital on the tumbling river St. Lawrence.
Though both came from beyond the same ocean, the Iroquois found that there was a great difference between the founders of “New England” and the founders of “New France.” The former settled down quietly, bought land, cleared it and raised crops. They treated the Indian very respectfully—paying little attention to him or his land. The French, however, were different. There was no end to their running about. Their arrival was scarcely noised abroad before they were seen hurrying up the inland rivers on missions of various import.