istory of Vigo and Parke counties,
Indiana, by Beckwith, Chapter Twenty, at page 208, recites that beavers
existed along all the small lakes and lesser river courses in northern
Indiana, They were plentiful in Dekalb, Marshall, Elkhart, Cass. White
and Steuben. It is well known that their dams existed in large numbers
in Newton and Jasper, and in practically all the Indiana counties north
of the Wabash river.

The above regions, with their wealth of peltries, England meant to hold
as long as possible against the American advance, and she succeeded in
doing so for twelve long years after the Revolution had closed.

CHAPTER IV

THE PRAIRIE AND THE BUFFALO

--_The buffalo as the main food supply of the Indians._

To describe all the wonders in the interior of the northwest would be a
serious, if not an impossible task. The Grand Prairie, however, stands
alone. It was one of the marvels of creation, resembling the ocean as
nothing else did, making men who saw, never forget.

On Sunday, the third day of November, 1811, General Harrison's army,
with scouts in front, and wagons lumbering along between the flanks,
crossed the Big Vermilion river, in Vermilion County, Indiana, traversed
Sand Prairie and the woods to the north of it, and in the afternoon of
the same day caught their first glimpse of the Grand Prairie, in Warren
County, then wet with the cold November rains. That night they camped in
Round Grove, near the present town of Sloan, marched eighteen miles
across the prairie the next day, and camped on the east bank of Pine
creek, just north of the old site of Brier's Mills. To the most of them,
the sight must have been both novel and grand; if they could have known
then that the vast undulating plain before them stretched westward in
unbroken grandeur, a distance of two hundred and fifty miles to the
Mississippi river at Quincy; that these vast possessions in a few short
years would pass from the control of the savage tribes that roamed over
them, and would become the future great granaries of the world,
producing enough cereals to feed an empire, what must have been their
thoughts?

The magnitude of this great plain, now teeming with thousands of homes
and farms, is seldom realized. Draw a straight line west from old Fort
Vincennes to the Mississippi, and practically all north of it, to the
Wisconsin line, is the Grand Prairie. "Westward of the Wabash, except
occasional tracts of timbered lands in nort