heir chiefs sat in the council,
they spoke often and they spoke boldly. They feared to look no one in
the face, not even the far-famed Timmendiquas himself. They were of
three clans: Unamis, which is the Turtle; Unaluchtgo, which is the
Turkey; and Minsi, the Wolf. Minsi was the most warlike and always led
the Lenni Lenape in battle. Chiefs of all three clans were present.

Next to the Lenni Lenape were the valiant Shawnees, who held all the
valley of the Scioto as far west as the Little Miami or Mud River. They
had a record for skill and courage that went far back into the mists of
the past, and of all the tribes, it was the Shawnees who hated the
whites most. Their hostility was undying. No Shawnee would ever listen
to any talk of peace with them. It must be war until the white vanguard
was destroyed or driven back over the mountains. So fearless were the
Shawnees that once a great band of them, detaching from the main tribe,
had crossed the Ohio and had wandered all the way through the southern
country, fighting Chickasaws, Creeks, and Choctaws, until they reached
the sea, more than a thousand miles from their old home. A cunning
chief, Black Hoof, who could boast that he had bathed his feet in the
salt water, had led them safely back more than twenty years before, and
now this same Black Hoof sat here in the council house of the Wyandots,
old and wrinkled, but keen of eye, eagle-beaked, and as shrewd and
daring as ever, the man who had led in an almost unknown border exploit,
as dangerous and romantic as the Retreat of the Ten Thousand.

The Shawnees claimed--and the legend was one that would never die among
them--that they originated in a far, very far, land, and that they were
divided into 12 tribes or sub-tribes. For some cause which they had
forgotten the whole nation marched away in search of a new home. They
came to a wide water that was bitter and salt to the taste. They had no
canoes, but the sea parted before them, and then the twelve tribes, each
with its leader at its head, marched on the ocean bottom with the wall
of waters on either side of them until they reached a great land which
was America. It is this persistent legend, so remarkable in its
similarity to the flight of the children of Israel from Egypt, even to
the number of the tribes, that has caused one or two earlier western
writers to claim that the Shawnees were in reality the Ten Lost Tribes
of Israel.

Next to the Shawnees were the Miamis,