illing that the
French should hold Canada, and keep the colonies from joining together
in a revolt against her, when she could easily have taken that province
and freed them from the inroads of the Canadian Indians. The colonies
would not unite against the common enemy, for fear one would have more
advantage than another from their union; but their traders went out
singly, through the West, and trading companies began to be formed in
Pennsylvania and Virginia. While Celoron was in Ohio claiming the whole
land for the king of France, the king of England was granting a great
part of the same to a company of Virginians, with the right to settle
it and fortify it The Virginia Company sent its agents to visit the
Miamis at Pickawillany a year later, and bound them to the English by
gifts of brandy, tobacco, beads, gay cloths, and powder.

The allied tribes, who had their capital at Pickawillany, numbered some
two thousand in all. The Miamis themselves are said to have been of the
same family as the great Iroquois nation of the East, who had beaten
their rivals of the Algonquin nation, and forced them to bear the name
of women. But many of the Ohio Indians were Delawares, who were of the
Algonquin family; they were by no means patient of the name of women,
and they and their friends now took the side of the French against the
English. When at last the West, together with the whole of Canada,
fell to the English and there presently began to be trouble between the
American colonists and the English king, all the Indians, both Iroquois
and Algonquins took part against the Americans. A little victory for
either side, however, with gifts of brandy and tobacco, would turn their
savage hearts toward the victors; and one must not be too confident in
saying that the Indians were always for the French against the English,
or always for the English against the Americans.

[Illustration: Pichawillany, Chief town of the Miamis 030]

In fact, one must speak mostly of the Indians in words that have a
double sense. The old explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and traders
all talk of nations, towns, villages, kings, half-kings, queens, and
princes, but these words present false images to our minds. Calling the
chief town of the Miamis at Pickawillany their capital gives the notion
of some such capital as Columbus or Washington; but if we imagine the
chief town of the Miamis as it really was, we see some hundreds of
wigwams in straggling clust