But little is definitely known of the Indian occupation of the Ohio country prior to 1750, and scarcely anything anterior to 1650. As far back in American history as the middle of the seventeenth century it is probable that the powerful but doom-destined Eries were in possession of the vast wilderness which is now the thickly settled, well improved State of Ohio, dotted with villages and cities and covered with the meshes of a vast net-work of railroads. Most of the villages of this Indian nation, it is supposed, were situated along the shore of the lake which has been given their name. The Andastes are said by the best authorities to have occupied the valleys of the Allegheny and upper Ohio, and the Hurons or Wyandots held sway in the northern peninsula between the lakes. All were genuinely Iroquois, and the western tribes were stronger than the eastern. The Iroquois proper (the Five Nations increased afterward to Six by the alliance of the Tuscarawas) formed their confederacy in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and through consolidation of strength overwhelmed singly and successively the Hurons, the Eries, and the Andastes. The time of the massacre of the Erie nation—for the war upon them culminated in a wholesale murder—is usually set down by antiquarians and historians as 1655, and the victory over the Andastes is, on good evidence, placed in the year 1672. About the same time a tribe, supposed to have been the Shwanees, were driven from the Ohio valley and far towards the Gulf of Mexico. And so the territory now Ohio became a land without habitation and served the victorious Iroquois as a vast hunting ground. Whether the Iroquois conquered the Miamis and their allies, the Illinois, is a question upon which leading students of Indian history have been equally divided. The Miamis had no traditions of ever having suffered defeat at the hands of the great confederacy, and their country, the eastern boundary of which was the Miami River, may have been the western limit of the Six Nations’ triumph. That they were often at war with the Iroquois is not disputed, however, by any writers of whom we have knowledge. Although the Six Nations were the nominal owners of the greater part of the territory now constituting the State of Ohio, they did not, after the war with the Canadian colonists broke out in 1663 (and probably for some years previously), exercise such domination over the country as to exclude other tribes. Such being the case, the long deserted and desolate wild was again the abode of the red man, and the wigwams of the race again appeared by the waters of the Muskingum, the Scioto, and the Miamis; by the Tuscarawas, the Cuyahoga, and the Maumee.