towns must have existed in that vicinity, and in fact their
possessions are said to have extended as far down the eastern shore of
Lake Michigan as the St. Joseph. To the south and east of these points
"their villages alternated with those of their old allies, the Hurons,
now called Wyandots, along the shore of Lake Erie from Detroit to the
vicinity of Beaver creek, in Pennsylvania." They were parties with the
Wyandots and Delawares and other tribes to the treaty of Fort Harmar,
Ohio, at the mouth of Muskingum, in 1789, whereby the Wyandots ceded
large tracts of land in the southern part of that state to the United
States government, and were granted in turn the possession and occupancy
of certain lands to the south of Lake Erie. The Ottawa title to any land
in southern Ohio, however, is exceedingly doubtful, and they were
probably admitted as parties to the above treaty in deference to their
acknowledged overlords, the Wyandots. Their long intercourse with the
latter tribe, in the present state of Ohio, who were probably the most
chivalrous, brave and intelligent of all the tribes, seems to have
softened their manners and rendered them less ferocious than formerly.
Like the Chippewas, their warriors were of fine physical mould, and
Colonel William Stanley Hatch, an early historian of Ohio, in writing of
the Shawnees, embraces the following reference to the Ottawas: "As I
knew them, (i. e., the Shawnees), they were truly noble specimens of
their race, universally of fine athletic forms, and light complexioned,
none more so, and none appeared their equal, unless it was their tribal
relatives, the Ottawas, who adjoined them. The warriors of these tribes
were the finest looking Indians I ever saw, and were truly noble
specimens of the human family." The leading warriors and chieftains of
their tribe, however, were great lovers of strong liquor, and Pontiac,
the greatest of all the Ottawas, was assassinated shortly after a
drunken carousal, and while he was singing the grand medicine songs of
his race.

But the wandering Ishmaelites of all the northwest tribes were the
Shawnees. Cruel, crafty and treacherous, and allied always with the
English, they took a leading part in all the ravages and depredations on
the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia during the revolution and led
expedition after expedition against the infant settlements of Kentucky,
from the period of the first pioneers in 1775, until Wayne's victory in
17