588 THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 
were now a broken and a seattered people, and the Miamis had been 
forced back until we find them seeking shelter under the guns of the 
French fort on the Illinois.* Such then being the condition of affairs 
throughout this portion of the Ohio Valley during the latter part of the 
seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, there was 
nothing to tempt the trader, or attract the missionary; and hence the 
absence of all mention of this region, save in the occasional notices of 
an Iroquois foray, or of the spasmodic attempts of their enemies at 
retaliation. Later on, about the middle of the last century, the above- 
mentioned tribes are found once more established within this region, 
having apparently retraced their steps. The Miamis are in western 
Ohio and northern Indiana, and the Shawnees of the Delaware, having 
been driven across the mountains, re-unite with their kindred from 
Georgia, and are settled in the valley of the Scioto, where singularly 
enough their villages are in the immediate neighborhood, if they do 
not occupy the very sites, of the famous mound centers of Chillicothe 
and Portsmouth.t Indeed, we are told that about A. D. 1750, at this 
latter point, their village was situated on both sides of the Ohio River, 
just as is the case with the mounds and embankments found there 
to-day. 
Of course it is not pretended that all the works in these valleys were 
erected subsequent to this date, and it is quite probable that not one of 
those of large size was, but that some of them were built after the arrival 
of the whites, a hundred and fifty or two hundred years earlier, is 
proved by the contents of mounds opened at Circleville and Marietta; 
and that these same Indians, or their immediate descendants, have 
within comparatively recent times “encompassed their villages with 
ditches and walls,” as well as palisades, is evident from the account 
new series, 1875, p. 137. ‘Formerly, divers nations dwelt on this river”—Hohio— 
‘“as the Chawanoes (Shawanees), a mighty and very populous people, who had above 
fifty towns, - - - who were totally destroyed or driven out of their country by 
the Irocois, this river being their usual road when they make war upon the nations 
who lie to the South or to the West:” Coxe’s Carolina, in Hist. Coll. Louisiana, 
part U1, p. 229. For an account of all that is known historically of the wanderings 
of the Shawnees, see Judge M. F. Force, Some Early Notices of the Indians of Ohio: 
Pamphlet, Cincinnati, 1879. 
*Tonti, in Hist. Coll. Louisiana, part 1, p. 66. ‘The Iroquois, after expelling the 
Hurons and exterminating the ries, who inhabited the country bordering on the 
Great Lakes, which now bear their names, events which happened about the years 
1650 to 1660, took possession of their vast territory, and retained it for more than a 
century after. Their hunting country, which they once occupied, is now embraced 
in the State of Ohio, and while in their possession was called Carrahague:” Appen- 
dix to Morse’s Report, p. 60. At the treaty of Fort Stanwix, in 1768, they sold all 
that region of country néw kuown as the State of Kentucky, claiming it by right of 
conquest: See Butler’s Kentucky, p. 378: Louisville, 1834. 
tSchooicraft, Indian Tribes, vol. v1, p. 277. Croghan, Journal, in Appendix to 
Butler’s Hist. of Kentucky, p. 462: Cincinnati, 1836. 
{Christopher Gist’s Journal, in Appendix to Pownall’s Topographical Description, 
p. 10: London, 1776. See also Croghan’s Journal. 
