The tribes in the Ohio country were far abler than those that the English first met to the eastward, and they were fiercer than the fiercest which the Americans have at last brought under control in the plains of the Far West. Pitiless as Sioux and Apache and Comanche have shown themselves in their encounters with the whites in our day, they were surpassed in ferocity by the Shawnees, the Wyandots, and the Miamis whom the backwoodsmen met in a thousand fights, a century or a century and a half ago. The Ohio Indians were unspeakably vicious, treacherous, and filthy, but they were as brave as they were vile, and they were as sagacious as they were false. They produced men whom we must call orators, statesmen, and generals, even when tested by the high standards of civilization. They excelled us in the art of war as it was adapted to the woods, and they despised the stupid and wasteful courage of the disciplined English soldier. Till the white men studied war from them they were always beaten in their fights with the red men, and it was hardly the fault of the Indians if the pioneers learned from them to be savages: to kill women and children as well as armed men, to tomahawk and scalp the wounded, to butcher helpless prisoners. But this befell, and it is this which makes many of the stories of Ohio so bloody. We must know their hideous facts fully if we would know them truly, or if we would realize the life that once passed in the shadows of our woods. The region that we now call Ohio was wonderfully varied and pleasant. The many rivers that watered it cleared their space to the sky where they ran, and here and there the meadows or prairies smiled to the sun in grass and flowers. But everywhere else there was the gloom of forests unbroken since the Mound Builders left the land. The long levels that bordered the great lake at the north, the noble hills that followed the course of the Beautiful River, the gently varied surfaces of the center, and the southwest, the swamps and morasses of the northwest, were nearly everywhere densely wooded. Our land was a woodland, and its life, when it first became known to the white man, was the stealthy and cruel life of the forest. Where the busy Mound Builders once swarmed, scanty tribes of savages lurked in the leafy twilight, hunting and fishing, and warring upon one another. They came and went upon their errands of death and rapine by trails unseen to other eyes, till the keen traders of Pennsylvania and Virginia began to find their way over them to their villages, and to traffic with the savages for the furs which formed their sole wealth.