andria, and on the Kentucky side
of the Ohio can be seen the white hamlet of Springville, at the feet
of the dentated hills which here closely approach the river.

The country about the mouth of the Scioto has long figured in Western
annals. Being a favorite rendezvous for the Shawanese, it naturally
became a resort for French and English fur-traders. The principal
part of the first Shawanese village--Shannoah Town, in the old
journals--was below the Scioto's mouth, on the site of Alexandria;
it was the chief town of this considerable tribe, and here Gist
was warned back, when in March, 1751, he ventured thus far while
inspecting lands for the Ohio Company. Two years later, there was a
great--perhaps an unprecedented--flood in the Ohio, the water rising
fifty feet above the ordinary level, and destroying the larger part of
the Shawanese village. Some of the Indians moved to the Little Miami,
and others up the Scioto, where they built, successively, Old and New
Chillicothe; but the majority remained, and rebuilt their town on
the higher land north of the Scioto, where Portsmouth now stands. An
outlying band had had, from before Gist's day, a small town across the
Ohio, the site of Springville; and it was here that George Croghan had
his stone trading house, which was doubtless, after the manner of the
times, a frontier fortress. In the French and Indian war (1758), the
Shawanese, tiring of continual conflict, withdrew from their Ohio
River settlements to Old (or Upper) Chillicothe, and thus closed the
once important fur-trade at the mouth of the Scioto. It was while
the Indian town at Portsmouth was still new (1755), that a party of
Shawanese brought here a Mrs. Mary Inglis, whom they had captured
while upon a scalping foray into Southwestern Virginia. The story of
the remarkable escape of this woman, at Big Bone Lick, of her long and
terrible flight through the wilderness along the southern bank of the
Ohio and up the Great Kanawha Valley, and her final return to home and
kindred, who viewed her as one delivered from the grave, is one of the
most thrilling in Western history.[A]

Although the Shawanese had removed from their villages on the Ohio,
they still lived in new towns in the north, within easy striking
distance of the great river; and, until the close of the eighteenth
century, were a continual source of alarm to those whose business
led them to follow this otherwise inviting highway to the continental
interio