“Your father of Virginia asks you to visit him and receive presents sent by your great father across the water.”
“That,” the Wyandots answered, “cannot be decided until after the big council at Logstown in the spring.”
“We will go on to the Shawnee,” said George Croghan.
That pleased Robert. The trail to the Shawnees led across White Woman’s Creek, where his mother lived among the Delawares. He found her there, and well.
“What are you doing, travelling with white people?” she asked.
“I am the mouth and ears of Captain Gist who brings peace belts from the Governor of Virginia,” he said proudly. “He is a good man.”
“I do not know him, but I know this Croghan,” she answered. “He is filling the country with his traders who feed the Indians rum against the law. I remember when I was a girl not as old as you I lived among the white people and they were good. They prayed much and did right. I have seen that as soon as they get into the woods they turn about and cheat and lie and do wrong. I would rather have you stay with Tanacharison, or else come home.”
“But all the English are not bad,” said Robert. And he had much to tell her, of Washington the American, and the old man, and Christopher Gist. But she would not believe, for through forty years she had seen only the rough traders.
The principal town of the terrible Shawnees, who were light of skin, red of heart, and looked upon the Delawares as grand-fathers, lay in the southwest, at the mouth of the river Sciota in southern Ohio. The Shawnees, like the Delawares, hated the Iroquois who had driven them and the Delawares out of their Pennsylvania homes.
The Shawnees, too, had heard that the French were taking the English traders away from the Indians of the Ohio. They held council with Captain Croghan and Christopher Gist in the great council house ninety feet long and roofed with bark, on the north side of the Ohio, here at Sonnioto.