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Rh wore on with little or no definite tidings from the north. The troops were exercised daily and the necessities of the possible campaign were pushed on up the line of forts from the Ohio River to Fort Jefferson. Contractors and quartermasters were kept busy supplying the comparatively large army. The army and the nation waited for word from the rapids of the Maumee. What would that word be?

As the leaves began to open, the emissaries of a hundred Indian nations were threading the forests of the Old Northwest and Canada upon trails converging on the western shore of Lake Erie. Roche de Bout, as the locality of the "Rapids of the Miami of the Lakes" was known, was on the present site of Maumee City, Ohio. Great fields of Indian corn spread up and down both sides of the broad valley; a score of vegetable plants thrived amid the corn. In the same area probably no such amount of ground was under cultivation by Indian squaws as in the Maumee Valley. The spreading fields supported many villages and it was from these important centers of