Forty years had passed away and changes had come to the western territory. The cross of Saint George, erected in the place of the lilies of France, had been supplanted by the flag of the young republic, which in one generation had extended its sway from the lakes to the gulf and from the Atlantic to the Rocky mountains. By treaties made in 1768 with the Iroquois and Cherokee, the two leading Indian confederacies in the east, the Ohio and the Kanawha had been fixed as the boundary between the two races, the Indians renouncing forever their claims to the seaboard, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna, while they were confirmed in their possession of the Alleghany, the Ohio, and the great northwest. But the restless borderer would not be limited, and encroachments on the native domain were constantly being made, resulting in a chronic warfare which kept alive the spirit of resentment. The consequence was that in the final struggle of the Revolution the Indian tribes ranged themselves on the British side. When the war ended and a treaty of peace was made between the new government and the old, no provision was made for the red allies of the king, and they were left to continue the struggle single-handed. The Indians claimed the Ohio country as theirs by virtue of the most solemn treaties, but pioneers had already occupied western Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and Kentucky, and were listening with eager attention to the reports brought back by adventurous hunters from the fertile lands of the Muskingum and the Scioto. They refused to be bound by the treaties of a government they had repudiated, and the tribes of the northwest were obliged to fight to defend their territories. Under the able leadership of Little Turtle they twice rolled back the tide of white invasion, defeating two of the finest armies ever sent into the western country, until, worn out by twenty years of unceasing warfare, and crushed and broken by the decisive victory of Wayne at the Fallen Timbers, their villages in ashes and their cornfields cut down, the dispirited chiefs met their conqueror at Greenville in 1795 and signed away the rights for which they had so long contended. [Illustration: +Fig. 57+—Greenville treaty medal, obverse and reverse.] By this treaty, which marks the beginning of the end with the eastern tribes, the Indians renounced their claims to all territory east of a line running in a general way from the mouth of the Cuyahoga on Lake Erie to the mouth of the Kentucky on the Ohio, leaving to the whites the better portion of Ohio valley, including their favorite hunting ground of Kentucky. The Delaware, the Wyandot, and the Shawano, three of the leading tribes, were almost completely shorn of their ancient inheritance and driven back as refugees among the Miami.