ung
about the camp, and came every day to visit their former prisoners and
bring them gifts. When the army took up its march some of them asked
leave to follow it back to Fort Pitt, and on the way they supplied their
adopted children and brothers with game, and sought in every way to show
their love for them.

Bouquet reached Pittsburg in ten days, without the loss of a single life
at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health.
Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan
loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the
fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys
between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian
and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land with covetous eyes:
even the fathers and husbands and brothers who had come seeking their
kindred among the Indians, had seen it with a longing to plant their
homes in it. Its charms had been revealed to great numbers of the people
who had known of it only from the traders before, and the savage was
doomed from that time to lose it; for it already belonged to the king of
England, and it rested with the English colonists to come and take it;
or so, at least, they thought.

IV. THE FORTY YEARS' WAR FOR THE WEST.

The French king gave up the West to the English king in 1763, but, as we
have seen, the Indians had no part in the bargain. They only knew that
they were handed over by those who had been their friends to those who
had been their enemies, and they did not consent. They had made war
upon the English colonists before, and now, in spite of the failure of
Pontiac, and in spite of Bouquet's march into the Ohio country,
they kept up their warfare for forty years, with a truce when it was
convenient, and a treaty of peace when it was convenient, but with a
steadfast purpose to drive the English settlers out, and to hold the
wilderness for themselves. It was not until long after their power was
broken by the American arms in 1794 that their struggle ended in the
region which ten years later became the state of Ohio.

There was misunderstanding on both sides. The Indians naturally supposed
that their own country belonged to them, and the colonists supposed
that their eastern and western borders were the two oceans. These were
commonly the boundaries which the English king had given them; and when
he had not been quite clear about it in his