the northwestern
confederacy. In a letter of General Anthony Wayne, written in 1794, he
asserts that: "The margins of these beautiful rivers, the Miamis of the
Lake (Maumee), and the Au Glaize (A southern tributary), appear like one
continued village for a number of miles, both above and below this
place, Grand Glaize, nor have I ever before beheld such immense fields
of corn in any part of America, from Canada to Florida."

After General Wayne's army had defeated the Indians at the battle of
Fallen Timbers on this river in 1794, they spent many days after that
conflict in destroying the fields of grain. One who marched with the
army, in August of the above year, describes Indian corn fields
extending for four or five miles along the Au Glaize, and estimated
that there were one thousand acres of growing corn. The whole valley of
the Maumee from its mouth to Fort Wayne, is described as being full of
immense corn fields, large vegetable patches, and old apple trees, and
it is related that Wayne's army, while constructing Fort Defiance for a
period of eight days, "obtained their bread and vegetables from the corn
fields and potato patches surrounding the fort."

Is it any wonder that along these wonderful basins should be located the
seats of power of the Miami Indians, the leaders of the western
confederacy that opposed the claims of the United States to the lands
north of the Ohio; that from the close of the Revolutionary war until
Wayne's victory in 1794, the principal contest was over the possession
of the Miami village, now Fort Wayne, which controlled the trade in both
the Wabash and the Maumee Valleys, and that President George Washington,
consummate strategist that he was, foresaw at once in 1789, the first
year of his presidency, that the possession of the great carrying place
at Miamitown would probably command the whole northwest and put an end
to the Indian wars?

CHAPTER VI

THE TRIBES OF THE NORTHWEST

--_A description of the seven tribes of savages who opposed the advance
of settlement in the Northwest. Their location. Kekionga, the seat of
Miami power._

We have now to consider those Indian tribes and confederacies, which at
the close of the Revolutionary war, inhabited the northwest territory.

Chief among them were the Wyandots, Miamis, Shawnees, Delawares,
Ottawas, Chippewas and Potawatomi. These were the seven tribes known in
after years as the "western confederacy," who fought so long a