; the Buried Plates.%--With
Louisburg back in their possession and no territory lost, the French
went on more vigorously than ever with their preparations to shut the
British out of the Mississippi valley; and as but one highway to the
valley, the Ohio River, was still unguarded, the governor of Canada, in
1749, dispatched Celoron de Bienville with a band of men in twenty-three
birch-bark canoes to take formal possession of the valley. Paddling up
the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, they carried their canoes across to
Lake Erie, and, skirting the southeastern shore, they landed and crossed
to Chautauqua Lake, down which and its outlet they floated to the
Allegheny River. Once on the Allegheny, the ceremony of taking
possession began. The men were drawn up, and Louis XV. was proclaimed
king of all the region drained by the Ohio. The arms of France stamped
on a sheet of tin were nailed to a tree, at the foot of which a lead
plate was buried in the ground. On the plate was an inscription claiming
the Ohio, and all the streams that run into it, in the name of the King
of France.

[Illustration: [1]Half of one of the lead plates]

[Footnote 1: Now owned by the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester,
Mass.]

* * * * *

TRANSLATION OF THE ENTIRE INSCRIPTION

In the year 1749, during the reign of Louis XV., King of France, we,
Celeron, commander of a detachment sent by the Marquis de la
Gallissoniere, commander in chief of New France, to restore tranquillity
in some savage villages of these districts, have buried this plate at
the confluence of the Ohio and ... this ... near the river Ohio, alias
Beautiful River, as a monument of our having retaken possession of the
said river Ohio and of those that fall into the same, and of all the
lands on both sides as far as the sources of the said rivers, as well as
of those of which preceding kings have enjoyed possession, partly by the
force of arms, partly by treaties, especially by those of Ryswick,
Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle.

* * * * *

A second plate was buried below the mouth of French Creek; a third near
the mouth of Wheeling Creek; and a fourth at the mouth of the Muskingum,
where half a century later it was found protruding from the river bank
by a party of boys while bathing. Yet another was unearthed at the mouth
of the Great Kanawha by a freshet, and was likewise found by a boy while
playing at the wate