Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 111 



Many a disheartened Frenchman dined on cooscoosh moist- 

 ened with opossum broth and seasoned with salt and fines 

 herbes, and counted this the least of his troubles in Louisiana. 



Later the French laid hold of the rich lands along the 

 Wabash and Kaskaskia, the American Bottom. In a strip 

 along the Mississippi three to seven miles wide, and about one 

 hundred miles long they planted orchards of fruit trees, wheat 

 and corn. They floated tons of flour, bacon, corned pork, hams 

 from bears and hogs, and myrtle wax down to New Orleans 

 on flat-boats, or in pirogues made of hollowed-out trees. The 

 trip down-river took a fortnight, what with keeping the boat 

 from running onto floating roots and shoals. From Indian 

 villages along the route the savages stared at the voyagers. 

 Often arrows, later musket balls, shot from a thicket on the 

 shore. Two weeks to float down to the Gulf; three months to 

 row the boat up-river, even with twenty men at the oars. No 

 wonder the French thought of the Illinois country as a granary 

 for Louisiana, but with no future possibilities of its own. The 

 English concurred in this. "The trade will go with the stream," 

 General Gage reported to Lord Shelburne in 1767. 



The country between the fall line and the Mississippi was a 

 battleground between settlers and Indians for a century. The 

 Shawnee chief Keigh-tugh-qua the name means "Young 

 Blade of the Maize" had taken toll of the advancing settle- 

 ments before the battle at Point Pleasant after which "Corn- 

 stalk" offered the colonists lasting peace. He and his Shawnees 

 retired to the plains of the Scioto. In 1777, true to his word, 

 Cornstalk appeared at the colonists' forts with warning that 

 the British were urging the Shawnees to attack the American 

 settlements. He gave himself and his son as hostages. He paid 

 for his honor with both their lives when the killing of a white 

 man by an Indian drove the settlers to revenge. 



With first the French and later the British inciting the 

 Indians of the Mississippi Valley against the colonists, the 

 backwoodsmen in the mountains and along the river valleys 

 assumed an importance to the Tidewater planters. How many 



