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Rh Erie. The St. Mary offered a roundabout water route to the same goal—a goal fortified by the line of British forts on the Lakes. Here encouragement of every description was to be had at all times—at the price of steadily resisting and ravaging the advancing American frontier line.

The three rivers, the Scioto and the two Miamis, offered thoroughfare from this vantage ground southward toward the Kentucky stations. The important Indian towns were located on the upper waters of the Little Miami, the Auglaize, and Maumee, with other villages on the portages between these streams and in the lower valleys of the Auglaize and Maumee. The largest Indian villages were the settlements at the junctions of the Maumee and Auglaize and the St. Mary and St. Joseph. The key of the region was the junction of the St. Mary with the St. Joseph—four water avenues, leading east (Maumee), west (Wabash), south (St. Mary), and north (St. Joseph), and each filled with Indian clearings and villages.

The land was covered with a network of Indian trails running in every direction, of