Those who deny to the American Indians any love for the beautiful and any exercise of imagination might be influenced to concede them the possession of such faculties, and in a high degree, by the abundance of their fanciful traditions, of which their account of the origin of the Piqua is a good example. According to their practical legend the tribe began in a perfect man who burst into being from fire and ashes. The Shawnees said to the first whites who mingled with them, that once upon a time when the wise men and chiefs of the nation were sitting around the smouldering embers of what had been the council fire, they were startled by a great puffing of fire and smoke, and suddenly, from the midst of the ashes and dying coals, there arose before them a man of splendid form and mien, and that he was named Piqua, to signify the manner of his coming into the world—that he was born of fire and ashes. This legend of the origin of the tribe, beautiful in its simplicity, has been made the subject of comment by several writers, as showing, in a marked manner, the romantic susceptibility of the Indian character. The name Megoachuke signifies a fat man filled—a man made perfect, so that nothing is wanting. This tribe had the priesthood. The Kiskapocke tribe inclined to war, and had at least one great war chief—Tecumseh. Chillicothe is not known to have been interpreted as a tribal designation. It was from this tribe that the several Indian villages on the Scioto and Miami were given the names they bore, and which was perpetuated by application to one of the early white settlements. The Shawnees have been styled “the Bedouins of the American wilderness” and “the Spartans of the race.” To the former title they seem justly entitled by their extensive and almost constant wanderings, and the latter is not an inappropriate appellation, considering their well known bravery and the stoicism with which they bore the consequences of defeat. From the time of their re-establishment upon the Scioto until after the treaty with Greenville, a period of from forty to fifty years, they were constantly engaged in warfare against the whites. They were among the most active allies of the French, and after the conquest of Canada, continued, in concert with the Delawares, hostilities which were only terminated by the marching of Colonel Boquet’s forces into the country of the latter. They made numerous incursions into Pennsylvania, the Virginia frontier, harassed the Kentucky stations, and either alone or in conjunction with the Indians of other tribes, actually attacked or, threatening to do so, terrorized the first settlers in Ohio from Marietta to the Miamis. They took an active part against the Americans in the war for independence and in the Indian war which followed, and a part of them, under the leadership of Tecumseh, joined the British in the War of 1812.