that they
had wiser, kinder, and juster treatment than we gave those who remained
with us, and who followed westward from their old hunting grounds in
Ohio the buffalo, the elk, the beaver, and the deer. Several nations,
or parts of nations, were gathered on reservations in Seneca, Lucas,
and Wyandot counties, where they were given land and taught farming and
other trades. Missionaries came to dwell among them and try to make them
Christians, and many were converted. The Quakers seem to have done the
best work in this way, for the Indians always trusted and loved the men
of peace.

But although their friends could teach the Indians to plow and sow,
to build houses and barns, to make tools and mend them, to sing and to
pray, and to wear clothes and to lead decent and sober lives, they could
not uproot all their old customs and superstitions. The superstition
that seemed to last longest was the belief in witchcraft, which was
indeed very common among their white neighbors. Nearly all forms of
sickness were treated as the effect of witchcraft by the Indians, and
the afflicted were carried into the woods and left alone with none near
them except the medicine man whose business it was to expel the witch.

A suspected witch or wizard might be safely killed by any kinsman of
the sufferer; and it is said that Indians were known to walk all the
way from the Mississippi to the Ohio reservations in order to shoot down
persons accused of witchcraft, and then return unmolested. In 1828,
the Mingo chief Seneca John was put to death by two of his tribesmen as
ruthlessly as Leatherlips in 1812. He was accused of having bewitched
the chief Comstock, and though he protested, "I loved my brother
Comstock better than the green earth. I stand upon; I would shed my
blood, drop by drop, to bring him back to life," yet he was sentenced
to die, and Comstock's brothers, Coonstick and Steel, carried out the
sentence.

In 1831 the Senecas ceded their lands, forty thousand acres on the
Sandusky, to the United States, and were removed to the southwest of the
Missouri. Each of the other reservations was given up in turn for lands
in the Far West, and in the early forties I myself, when a boy living in
Hamilton, saw the last of the Ohio Indians passing through the town on
the three canal boats which carried the small remnant of their nation
southward and westward out of the hind that was to know them no more
forever.

[Illustration: Indian evacu