Their territory embraced all of Ohio, west of the Scioto;
all of Indiana, and that part of Illinois, south of the Fox river and
Wisconsin, on which frontier they were intermingled with the Kickapoos
and some other small tribes." Harrison may have been right as to the
ancient and original bounds of this tribe, but Little Turtle, their most
famous chieftain, said at the Treaty of Greenville, in 1795: "It is well
known by all my brothers present, that my fore-father kindled the first
fire at Detroit; from thence, he extended his lines to the head-water of
Scioto; from thence, to its mouth; from thence, down the Ohio, to the
mouth of the Wabash, and from thence to Chicago, on Lake Michigan." The
truth is, that the ancient demesne of the Miamis was much curtailed by
the irruption of three tribes from the north in about the year 1765, the
Sacs and Foxes, the Kickapoos and the Potawatomi, who conquered the old
remnants of the Illinois tribes in the buffalo prairies and divided the
country among themselves.

Says Hiram Beckwith, in speaking of the Potawatomi: "Always on friendly
terms with the Kickapoos, with whom they lived in mixed villages, they
joined the latter and the Sacs and Foxes in the exterminating war upon
the Illinois tribes, and afterwards obtained their allotment of the
despoiled domain." The Potawatomi advancing by sheer force of numbers,
rather than by conquest, finally appropriated a large part of the lands
in the present state of Indiana, north of the Wabash, commingling with
the Kickapoos at the south and west, and advancing their camps as far
down as Pine creek. The Miamis were loud in their remonstrances against
this trespassing, and denounced the Potawatomi as squatters, "never
having had any lands of their own, and being mere intruders upon the
prior estate of others," but the Potawatomi were not dispossessed and
were afterwards parties to all treaties with the United States
government for the sale and disposal of said lands. The Miamis also lost
a part of their lands on the lower west side of the Wabash to the
Kickapoos. Pressing eastward from the neighborhood of Peoria, the
Kickapoos established themselves on the Vermilion, where they had a
village on both sides of that river at its confluence with the main
stream. They were, says Beckwith, "Greatly attached to the Vermilion and
its tributaries, and Governor Harrison found it a difficult task to
reconcile them to ceding it away."

To the last, however