g readers to remember that
the Ohio stories which I hope to tell them are important chiefly because
they are human stories, and record incidents in the life of the whole
race. They cannot be taken from this without losing their finest
meanings.

III. OHIO BECOMES ENGLISH.

Neither the French nor the English had any right to the Ohio country
which they both claimed. If it belonged to any people of right, it
belonged to the savages, who held it in their way before the whites
came, and who now had to choose which nation should call itself their
master. They chose the French, and they chose wisely for themselves as
savages; for, as I have said, if the French had prevailed in the war
that was coming, the Indians could have kept their forests and lived
their forest life as before. The French would have been satisfied in
the West as they had been in the North, with their forts and trading
stations, and the Indians could have hunted, and fished, and trapped, as
they had always done. In fact, the French people would often have become
like them. They understood the Indians and liked them; sometimes they
mated with them, and their children grew up as wild as their mothers.
The religion that the French priests taught the Indians, pleased while
it awed them, and it scarcely changed their native customs.

Wherever the English came, the Indians' woods were wasted, and the
Indians were driven out of the land.

The English tried neither to save their souls nor to win their hearts;
they both hated and despised the savages, and ruthlessly destroyed them.
Now, when the smoldering strife between the French and English in
the West burst into an open flame of war between the two nations, the
Western tribes took the side of those whom reason and instinct taught
them to know as their best friends.

But ten years after Celoron visited Ohio, Wolfe captured Quebec, and
France gave up to England not only the whole of Canada, but the whole of
the vast region between the lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and kept for
herself only the Province of Louisiana. The Indians were left to
their fate, and they made what terms they could with the English. They
promised peace, but they broke their promises, and constantly harassed
the outlying English settlements. At one time they joined together under
the great chief Pontiac, and tried to win back the West for themselves.
The French forts had been ceded to Great Britain and garrisoned with
British troo