The race of the red man is becoming slowly exterminated, and his friends of the forest seem to be disappearing with him, while the white man and the mosquito fill their places. I am sure no one of average reason, especially our logicians of New Jersey, would deny that this is another proof of the survival of the fittest.
Although it was dark before I came into Huron, I could get a very good idea of its character, and had formed some notion of the place which was to shelter me. In 1848 it was spoken of as having been "formerly the greatest business place in the county," and this reputation, although it has not made it a Sandusky or a Cleveland, has left it a spark of the old energy.
Sixty-third Day.
West House,
Sandusky, Ohio,
July Thirteenth.
I was fortunate in having a comparatively short distance to travel between Huron and this city. It is only nine miles, and I did not start until two o'clock, allowing myself a two hour's easy gallop with the lake on my right all the way.
Along this shore more than a century ago, General Bradstreet, with three thousand men, sailed to the relief of Fort Junandat, while Pontiac, the great Ottawa warrior, was besieging Detroit. Reaching Fort Sandusky he burned the Indian villages there and destroyed the cornfields; passed on up to Detroit to scatter the threatening savages, and returning went into the Wyandot country through Sandusky Bay. To have attempted to ride alone on horseback in those days would have been a foolhardy, if not a fatal undertaking. Now the screech of an engine-whistle announced the approach of a train on the Lake Shore Road, the great wheels thundered by, and Paul, alert and trembling, was ready to dash away. How different it would have been in those old pioneer times! The horseman would have been the one to tremble then, his hand reach for his rifle, his eyes strained towards the thicket from whence the expected yell of the savage was to come.
Among the first proprietors of this section were the Eries. These were followed by the resistless Iroquois, and after them the Wyandots and Ottawas, who seem to have left the strongest impress upon the hills and valleys of Ohio. One of these tribes, the Wyandots, called the bay near which they built their wigwams Sæ-san-don-ske, meaning "Lake of the Cold Water," and from this the present name of the city comes. In the early days it was called Ogontz, after a big chief of that name who lived there before the year 1812. All about were rich hunting-grounds, which accounts for its having been chosen by the Indians in times of peace; and even now Sandusky is held to be one of the greatest fish-markets in America.
The place was bound to be attractive to the white man, and any one might have safely prophesied that a city would rise here. The ground slopes gradually down to the lake, the bay forms an ideal harbor, and looking off upon the boats and water, the eye rests upon a scene picturesque and striking.