The various campaigns directed from Kentucky and western Pennsylvania had, by 1779, comparatively freed what is now eastern and central Ohio of red-men. Little by little they had been pushed in a northwesterly direction until the headwaters of the Great and Little Miami and Scioto were reached. Here on the backbone of Ohio, near the headwaters of the St. Mary and Auglaize Rivers--a pleasant country which the Indians always loved--the most heroic stand was yet to be made against the encroaching white men. The point of vantage was well chosen, as the bloody years of 1780-1795 proved. The forests were divided by large stretches of open land, which were easily cultivated and exceedingly rich. To the northward flowed the Auglaize River affording a highway to the great Maumee Valley and Lake 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 which surprisingly little can be definitely stated. Considering how numerous are the old-time maps which show the roads of the red-men in eastern and central Ohio and in Kentucky, it is remarkable that almost none give the routes in western Ohio and eastern Indiana. By comparison of contemporaneous authorities it is certain there were three important landward thoroughfares leading northward from the Ohio River into the region here under view. In general terms, the most easterly of these ascended the valley of the Little Miami; another passed northward on the watershed between the two Miamis; the third ran north from the present site of Cincinnati on the watershed to the west of the Great Miami, with branches running into and up the river valley itself. All of these routes led to the strategic portages which connected the two Miamis and the Scioto with the St. Mary and Auglaize tributaries of the Maumee.[63]