on and the leading chiefs and their
followers went into the woods to kill game. They had nothing in reserve
to live upon, and in a hard season their women and children would have
suffered. The French residents here seem to have been a gay, rollicking
set, playing flutes and fiddles, dancing and playing cards, and
generally going home drunk from every social gathering. The few English
among them were no better, and we have the edifying spectacle of one
giving away his daughter to another over a bottle of rum. The mightiest
chieftains, including Le Gris, did not scruple to beg for whiskey, and
parties of warriors were arriving from the Ohio river and Kentucky, with
the scalps of white men dangling at their belts.

There was still a considerable activity at this place, however, in the
fur trade, and the English thought it well worth holding. Raccoon, deer,
bear, beaver, and otter skins were being brought in, although the season
was not favorable during which Hay sojourned there on account of it
being an open winter. Constant communication was kept up with Detroit on
the one hand and the Petit Piconne (Tippecanoe) and Ouiatenon on the
other. La Fountaine, Antoine LaSalle, and other famous French traders of
that day were doing a thriving business in the lower Indian country.

That these Miami villages were also of great strategical value from the
military standpoint, and that this fact was well known to President
Washington, has already been mentioned. The French early established
themselves there, and later the English, and when the Americans after
the Revolution took dominion over the northwest and found it necessary
to conquer the tribes of the Wabash and their allies, one of the first
moves of the United States government was to attack the villages at this
place, break up the line of their communication with the British at
Detroit, and overawe the Miamis by the establishment of a strong
military post.

To the last, the Miamis clung to their old carrying place. Wayne
insisted at the peace with the Miamis and their allies, at Greenville,
Ohio, in 1795, that a tract six miles square around the newly
established post at Fort Wayne should be ceded to the United States,
together with "one piece two miles square on the Wabash river, at the
end of the portage from the Miami of the Lake (Maumee), and about eight
miles westward from Fort Wayne." This proposal was stoutly resisted by
the Little Turtle, who among other things said