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 THE STORY OF TECUMSEH

CHAPTER I. THE BIRTH OF TECUMSEH.

IN the latter part of the eighteenth century there stood on the banks of the Mad River (a tributary of the Ohio), about seven miles below the site of the present city of Springfield, a village of the Shawanoe Indians, called Piqua. This village had been built on the site of an ancient Indian town known as "Chilicothe." Near the river, the banks of which at this point were about twenty feet high, stood a rude fort, built of logs and surrounded by a stockade of cedar pickets. Outside the stockade were grouped the huts and wigwams of the inhabitants, and surrounding the village were the cornfields and orchards. Looking to the southward there met the eye a stretch of prairie-land hemmed in by the forest. On this prairie roamed occasional herds of buffalo, wanderers from the great plains of the West. Deer and antelope were to be seen in great numbers, feeding on the rich prairie grass. Beyond the village to the westward lay the unbroken forest. On the north the land was rough and broken, rising abruptly into rocky cliffs. Here and there a dwarfed cedar or pine clung to the face of the precipice with gnarled and twisted roots, or a hardy vine hung its 11