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WASHINGTON'S ROAD

tribe of the Shawanese "had gone quite down to New Spain." When La Salle wished guides from Lake Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico in 1684, Shawanese were supplied him, it being as remarkable that there were Shawanese so far north (though they may have been prisoners among the Iroquois) as it was that they were acquainted with the Gulf of Mexico. In the Black Forest the Shawanese gained another and a well-earned reputation—of being the fiercest and most uncompromising Indian nation with which the white man ever dealt. They were, for the half century during which the Black Forest of Ohio was their home and the Wyandots their allies, ever first for war and last for peace. Under their two well known terrible chieftains, Cornstalk and Tecumseh, they were allied both with the French and with the British in the vain attempt to hold back the tide of civilization from the river valleys of the Central West. Missionary work among them proved a failure. They made treaties but to break them. Not an acre of all the land which lay south of them, Kentucky, but was drenched by blood they spilt. Incited by such hell-