Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 3).djvu/63

Rh hounds the Girty boys, there was no limit to which the Shawanese could not be pushed, and for it all they had been trained by instinct and tradition through numberless years of desperate ill fortune.

The Wyandots and Shawanese came from the North and South. The third nation which made the hunting-grounds of the Iroquois its home-land came from the eastern seaboard. The legendary history of the Lenni-Lenapes cannot be equaled, in point of romance, in Indian history. Tradition states that they lived at a very early period west of the Mississippi river. Uniting with their neighbors, the Iroquois, the two nations began an eastward conquest which ended in driving the giant Alleghans, the mound-builders, from the alluvial valleys of the Scioto, Miami, Muskingum, Wabash, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Illinois, where their mounds and ring forts were found, and dividing between them the Atlantic seaboard, the Iroquois taking the north and the Lenni-Lenapes settling in the valley of the Delaware, where they took the name of Delawares. But not long after this division had been effected the spirit