In fact, neither the battles nor the treaties between the French and English in Europe had really settled the question of their claim to the West in America, and both sides began to urge it in a time of peace by every kind of secret and open violence. As for the Miamis and their allies among the neighboring tribes, they believed that God had created them on the very spot where Céloron found them living, and when he asked them to leave their capital at Pickawillany, and go to live near the French post on the Maumee, they answered him that they would do so when it was more convenient. He bade them banish the English traders, but they merely hid them, while he was with them, and as soon as he was gone, they had them out of hiding, and began to traffic with them. They never found it more convenient to leave their town, until a few years later, when a force of Canadians and Christian Indians came down from the post on the Maumee, and destroyed Pickawillany. Céloron came into the Ohio country through the western part of New York. He launched his canoes on the head waters of the Beautiful River, as the French called the Ohio, and drifted down its current till he reached the mouth of the Great Miami. He worked up this shallow and uncertain stream into Shelby County, where he had his friendly but fruitless meeting with the chief of the Miamis. After that he kept on northward to the Maumee, and then embarked on Lake Erie, and so got back to Canada. It could not be honestly said that he had done much to make good his king’s claim to the country with his plates of tin and lead. He had flattered and threatened the Indians at several places; and the Indians had promised, over the cups of brandy and pipes of tobacco which he supplied them, to be good subjects to Louis XV., who was such a very bad king that he did not deserve even such subjects as they meant to be. They seem not to have taken Céloron’s warnings very seriously, though he told them that the English traders would ruin them, and that they were preparing the way for the English settlers, who would soon swarm into their country, and drive them out. The Indians did not believe Céloron, and yet he told them the truth. The English traders were often men of low character, thoroughly dishonest in their dealings, and the English settlers were only waiting for the end of the struggle with the French to come and take the Indians’ lands from them. If the French soldiers and the French priests had won in that struggle, Ohio and the whole West might now be something like the Province of Quebec as it was then. The Indians would have been converted to the Catholic faith, and they would still be found in almost as great numbers as ever throughout the vast region where hardly one of their blood remains.