hundred Canadians and French troops, officered by
French gentlemen, and attended by one of those brave priests who led or
followed wherever the French flag was carried in the wilderness. Celoron
was sent by the governor of Canada to lay claim to the Ohio valley for
his king, and he did this by very simple means. He nailed plates of
tin to certain trees, and he buried plates of lead at the mouths of the
larger streams. The leaden plates no one ever saw for a hundred years,
till some boys going to bathe found them here and there in the wave-worn
banks; but if the Indians could have read anything, or if the English
traders could have read French, they might have learned at once from
the tin plates that the king of France owned the "Ohio River and all the
waters that fell into it, and all the lands on both sides." As it was,
however, it is hard to see how anybody was the wiser for them, or could
know that the king had upheld his right to the Ohio country by battle
and by treaty and would always defend it.

In fact, neither the battles nor the treaties between the French and
English in Europe had really settled the question of their claim to the
West in America, and both sides began to urge it in a time of peace
by every kind of secret and open violence. As for the Miamis and their
allies among the neighboring tribes, they believed that God had created
them on the very spot where Celoron found them living, and when he asked
them to leave their capital at Pickawillany, and go to live near the
French post on the Maumee, they answered him that they would do so when
it was more convenient. He bade them banish the English traders, but
they merely hid them, while he was with them, and as soon as he was
gone, they had them out of hiding, and began to traffic with them. They
never found it more convenient to leave their town, until a few years
later, when a force of Canadians and Christian Indians came down from
the post on the Maumee, and destroyed Pickawillany.

Celoron came into the Ohio country through the western part of New York.
He launched his canoes on the head waters of the Beautiful River, as the
French called the Ohio, and drifted down its current till he reached the
mouth of the Great Miami. He worked up this shallow and uncertain stream
into Shelby County, where he had his friendly but fruitless meeting with
the chief of the Miamis. After that he kept on northward to the Maumee,
and then embarked on Lake Erie, and so g