Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 3).djvu/65

Rh Dismayed and disgraced, the Delawares retired from the green maize fields which they loved, and fell back, a crowd of disordered fugitives, into the Alleghany forests. Sifting through the forests, crowding the Shawanese before them, they at last crossed the Allegheny and settled down on the upper Muskingum, about 1740. Here they lived for half a century, fighting with Villiers and Pontiac and Little Turtle. Here they were visited by armies, and by missionaries who did noble work among them. The Delawares, later, fought against the armies of Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne, after they abandoned the valley which was first their home, and then sank hopelessly into the general rout of the broken tribes moving westward after the battles of Fallen Timbers and Tippecanoe. On the Kansas river and its tributaries the remnant of the once powerful Lenni-Lenape range today over a territory of a million acres, still dreaming, it is said, of a time when they will again assume their historic position at the head of the Indian family. A great mass of tradition lives with them of their eastward conquest, the homes on