er Chiningue, the Shenango of the English,
on the Alleghany.]

The reply of the chiefs, though sufficiently humble, was not all that
could be wished. They begged that the intruders might stay a little
longer, since the goods they brought were necessary to them. It was in
fact, these goods, cheap, excellent, and abundant as they were, which
formed the only true bond between the English and the Western tribes.
Logstown was one of the chief resorts of the English traders; and at
this moment there were ten of them in the place. Celoron warned them
off. "They agreed," says the chaplain, "to all that was demanded, well
resolved, no doubt, to do the contrary as soon as our backs were
turned."

Having distributed gifts among the Indians, the French proceeded on
their way, and at or near the mouth of Wheeling Creek buried another
plate of lead. They repeated the same ceremony at the mouth of the
Muskingum. Here, half a century later, when this region belonged to the
United States, a party of boys, bathing in the river, saw the plate
protruding from the bank where the freshets had laid it bare, knocked it
down with a long stick, melted half of it into bullets, and gave what
remained to a neighbor from Marietta, who, hearing of this mysterious
relic, inscribed in an unknown tongue, came to rescue it from their
hands.[8] It is now in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian
Society.[9] On the eighteenth of August, Celoron buried yet another
plate, at the mouth of the Great Kenawha. This, too, in the course of a
century, was unearthed by the floods, and was found in 1846 by a boy at
play, by the edge of the water.[10] The inscriptions on all these plates
were much alike, with variations of date and place.

[Footnote 8: O.H. Marshall, in _Magazine of American History, March,_
1878.]

[Footnote 9: For papers relating to it, see _Trans. Amer. Antiq. Soc_.,
II.]

[Footnote 10: For a facsimile of the inscription on this plate, see
_Olden Time,_ I. 288. Celoron calls the Kenawha, _Chinodahichetha_. The
inscriptions as given in his Journal correspond with those on the plates
discovered.]

The weather was by turns rainy and hot; and the men, tired and famished,
were fast falling ill. On the twenty-second they approached Scioto,
called by the French St. Yotoc, or Sinioto, a large Shawanoe town at the
mouth of the river which bears the same name. Greatly doubting what
welcome awaited them, they filled their powderhorns and prepared for