Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 3).djvu/60

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56
WASHINGTON'S ROAD

tionary War and they were as true to the very last to them as they had formerly been to the French. Through their aid England managed to retain forts Sandusky, Miami, and Detroit for twenty years after the close of the Revolution, despite the solemn pledges given in the Treaty of Paris.

The Wyandots came from the far north. The second nation to enter the Alleghany forests were the Shawanese who came from the far south. The Shawanese were the only American Indians who had even so much as a tradition of having come to this continent from across the ocean. Like that of the savage Wyandots, the history of the Shawanese before they settled down on the swift Scioto is a cheerless tale. Too proud to join one of the great southern confederacies, if, indeed, the opportunity was ever extended to them, they sifted northward through the forests from Florida until they settled between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. Here the earliest geographers found them and classified them as the connecting branch between the Algonquins of New England and the far northwest, so different were they from their southern