ldren.

So lately as 1812 two little girls were stolen from their fathers'
houses in Preble County by the Indians. They could not be traced, but
twenty-five years later, one of them, named Parker, was found living
with her savage husband in Indiana. She refused then to go home with her
father, saying coldly that she should be ridiculed there for her Indian
customs.

XV. INDIAN HEROES AND SAGES.

The Ohio Indians were of almost as mixed origin as the white people
of Ohio, and if they had qualities beyond those of any other group of
American savages, it was from much the same causes which have given the
Ohioans of our day distinction as citizens. They made the Ohio country
their home by a series of chances, and they defended it against the
French, the English, and Americans in turn, because it had bounds which
seemed to form the natural frontier between them and the Europeans.

It is now believed that before the coming of our race there was a
balance of power between those two great North American nations, the
Iroquois and the Algonquins, and that our wars and intrigues destroyed
this balance, which was never restored, and put an end to all hope of
advance in the native race. Whether this is true or not, it is certain
that the hostilities between the tribes raged down to our day, and
that these seem to have continued if not begun through one family, the
Algonquins, siding with the French, and the other family, the Iroquois,
siding with the English. The Algonquins were most powerful in New
England and Canada, and the Iroquois in New York. Their struggle ended
in the overthrow of the Algonquins in the regions bordering on the
English colonies, where, as has been told, a great branch of that
people who called themselves the Lenni-lenape, and whom we called the
Delawares, dwelt in a sort of vassalage to the Iroquois.

In Ohio, however, these families, so long broken elsewhere by their
feuds, united in a common fear and hate of the white men. Many of the
Ohio Indians were Delawares, but the Miamis were Iroquois, while the
Wyandots again were Hurons, one of the finest and ablest of the Iroquois
nation. They ceased to make war upon each other, and in their union the
strongest traits of both were blended. Their character appears at its'
best, I think, in Tecaughretanego, the adoptive brother of James Smith,
and in the great Mingo chief, Logan.

Of Tecaughretanego, his unselfishness, his piety, his common sense, his
w