c coast became fringed with colonies, extending but a few leagues
back into the country from the sea-shore, while the vast interior
remained an unexplored wilderness. As the years rolled on, ship-loads of
emigrants arrived, new settlements were established, colonial States
rose into being, and, though there were many sanguinary conflicts with
the Indians, the Europeans were always in the end triumphant, and
intelligence, wealth, and laws of civilization were rapidly extended
along the Atlantic border of the New World.

For many years there had been a gradual pressure of the colonists
towards the west, steadily encroaching upon the apparently limitless
wilderness. To us it seems strange that they did not, for the sake of
protection against the Indians, invariably go in military bands. But
generally this was not the case. The emigrants seem to have been
inspired with a spirit of almost reckless indifference to danger; they
apparently loved the solitude of the forest, avoided neighbors who might
interfere with their hunting and trapping, and reared their humble
cottages in the wildest ravines of the mountains and upon the smooth
meadows which border the most solitary streams; thus gradually the tide
of emigration, flowing through Indian trails and along the
forest-covered vines, was approaching the base of the Alleghany
mountains.

But little was known of the character of the boundless realms beyond the
ridges of this gigantic chain. Occasionally a wandering Indian who had
chased his game over those remote wilds, would endeavor to draw upon the
sand, with a stick, a map of the country showing the flow of the rivers,
the line of the mountains, and the sweep of the open prairies. The Ohio
was then called the Wabash. This magnificent and beautiful stream is
formed by the confluence of the Alleghany and the Monongahela rivers. It
was a long voyage, a voyage of several hundred miles, following the
windings of the Monongahela river from its rise among the mountains of
Western Virginia till, far away in the north, it met the flood of the
Alleghany, at the present site of the city of Pittsburg. The voyage, in
a birch canoe, required, in the figurative language of the Indians, "two
paddles, two warriors and three moons."

The Indians very correctly described the Ohio, or the Wabash, as but the
tributary of a much more majestic stream, far away in the west, which,
pouring its flood through the impenetrable forest, emptied itself t