ing them for
Indians, were about to fire on them when Wells suddenly called out that
the first who fired should have a bullet through his own head. He had
recognized the Indians, and he said that when he was a captive in their
tribe, this family had fed and clothed him, and nursed him in sickness,
and treated him as tenderly as one of themselves. The backwoodsmen
joined Wells in talk with his friends, urging them to do what they could
for peace among their people, and left them to paddle away in their
canoe unharmed.

Wells had been the adoptive son of Little Turtle, who led the Indians at
St. Clair's defeat, and he had fought on the side of the savages in that
battle. But after it was over he foresaw that the war must end in favor
of the white men, and he decided to abandon his wild brethren. He spoke
first with Little Turtle as they were walking in the woods together and
warned him in words that a real Indian might have used. "When the sun
reaches the meridian, I leave you for the whites; and whenever you meet
me in battle you must try to kill me, as I shall try to kill you."

But the real Indians had not Wells's forecast, and they continued the
war till they were beaten by Wayne, in whose army Little Turtle might
have found his adoptive son. Little Turtle was himself one of the last
chiefs to yield, but he came in with the rest at Greenville, and one
year after the battle of Fallen Timbers signed the treaty by which
ninety chiefs and the deputies of twelve tribes gave up the Ohio River
as the Indian border, and ceded half the Ohio lands to the United
States.

Little Turtle, or Moshokonoghua, as he was called in the tongue of his
nation, the Miamis, lived for thirty years after signing the treaty, and
then died of gout at Fort Wayne. He traveled through the Eastern States
in the first years of the peace, and gave people there a different
impression from that received by those who knew him before the defeat of
St. Clair, and saw him leading the victors in that battle. He struck all
who met him as a man of intelligence and wit; he got the habit of high
living and bore himself like the gentlemen whose company he loved to
frequent. At Philadelphia the famous Polish exile and patriot Kosciusko
gave him his pistols and bade him shoot dead with them any man who
attempted to rob him of his country.

His business in the East was to interest people in the civilization
of his tribe, but he had no purpose of living among the