The Indian braves realized that a crucial moment in their history had come. Their allies, the British, had gone down in defeat before the Thirteen Fires. Henceforth the tribes must look to their own councils, and rely upon their own strength, and they swore grimly that the Ohio should run with blood, and that the advent of every western pioneer should bring an additional scalp for the grewsome decoration of their lodges. But these hardy voyagers, now celebrating a frugal Christmas as they steered their course down the swollen and half-frozen Ohio, were not to be turned aside by impending conflict with savage tribes. To meet grave danger like brave men was for them no new experience; they had passed through seven years of revolution; they had stood the trying tests of honorable hardships, and were now making their way to found a community which was to develop within a few generations into one of the greatest inland cities of the world. Four days they fought their way through floating masses of débris and ice, finally finding their haven in Sycamore Inlet, opposite the mouth of the Licking River. To-day the traveller, smoking meditatively in a Pullman, will cover the same distance before he has occasion to light a fresh cigar. In a grove of sycamores, osiers and water maples they struck their flint and built their fires. There was no theatrical assertion of dominion, nor is it on record that sacred rites were invoked to consecrate the struggle for civilization that was to centre round this far outpost of the Republic, and yet their first performance was one of the most dramatic incidents in western history; for, knowing that savage armies lurked in the dim woods that overhung the terraces above them, these twenty-six hardy Anglo-Saxons dismantled the crafts that had carried them into the far wilderness, and converted the planks and timbers of their barges into cabins. There was to be no retreat. In the name of the new Democracy, they established the primitive beginnings of a great city in the very centre of the famous Indian path over which for unnumbered centuries naked aborigines from the Great Lakes to the Kentucky hunting grounds had hurried to battle or the chase. The new settlement thus became a bold and significant challenge to the red man, and in its fate was involved the future of the West and of the nation. The earthquake of war, which the founding of Cincinnati invited, was not long delayed, and when it came it startled Washington from his incomparable composure, and shook the Republic to its foundations.