and at the hour fixed for his death walked from his lodge to his grave,
chanting his death song while he went. Then as he knelt in prayer beside
the shallow pit, one of the six Wyandots tomahawked him.

The persecutions for witchcraft under the Prophet continued until at
last a young warrior, whose sister was accused in the council, had the
courage to rise and lead her out of the house. He came back and said to
the council, pointing at the Prophet, "The Devil has come amongst us,
and we are killing each other." This bold good sense brought the Indians
to a pause in a frenzy which has raged among every people in times past.

[Illustration: Tomahawk 159]

XVI. LIFE IN THE BACKWOODS.

Amidst all this tomahawking and scalping, this shooting and stabbing,
this shedding of blood and of tears, this heartbreak of captivity,
this torture, this peril by day and by night, the flower of home was
springing up wherever the ax let the sun into the woods. It would be a
great pity if the stories of cruelty and suffering which seem, while we
read them, to form the whole history of the Ohio country, should be left
without the relief of facts quite as true as these sad tales. Life was
hard in those days, but it was sweet too, and it was often gay and glad.
In times of constant danger, and even while the merciless savages were
beleaguering the lonely clusters of cabins, there was frolicking among
the young people in the forts, and the old people looked on at their
joys in sympathy as well as wonder. The savages themselves had their
harmless pleasures, and their wild life was so free that those who once
knew it did not willingly forsake it. They were not bad-hearted so much
as wrong-headed, and they were mostly what they were, because they knew
no better. More than once we read how the lurking hunter heard them
joking and laughing when off their guard in the wood; and in their
towns, on the Miamis or the Muskingum or the Sandusky, they had their
own games, and feasts, and merrymakings. Much that was beautiful and
kindly and noble was possible to them, but they belonged to the past,
and the white men belonged to the future; and the war between the two
races had to be. Our race had outgrown the order which theirs clung to
helplessly as well as willfully, and it was fated that we must found our
homes upon their graves.

These homes were at first of the rude and simple sort, which a thousand
narratives and legends have made familiar,