It seems a curious problem now, how such a people were to be called together; but their runners were almost as fleet of foot as the deer in the forest, and their trails were the connecting links, not only between village and village, clans and nations, but stretched far away to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic ocean and the northern lakes. They were a mere foot-path, just wide enough for one to walk therein, but they were sometimes so deep by the myriad footsteps which traversed them for centuries, that the sides were several inches deep. And these trails have become the thorough-fare of our great nation. In them the Indians wound along beneath the mountains and through the valleys, carrying the light canoe upon their shoulders, in which they skimmed the broadest lakes and deepest rivers, and were so familiar with all the connecting links, that the darkest recesses of the forest were threaded as easily as the streets of a village, and almost as quickly as the fiery engine wheels its way over the smooth iron pathway. I have heard a young Indian say, that his father had often run from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico, and for four or five days at a time, scarcely stopping to eat by the way. And I have heard an aged Indian say, that in the days of his youth, he would run the distance between certain boundaries, which must have included forty miles, returning the same day, and thought it no great feat. Only a few years ago there was a trial of speed between an Indian runner and several horsemen, or their caparisoned steeds, and the runner left the horsemen far in the rear. But it is not by these thoroughfares alone that the Indian is to be traced in all our borders. Their expressive and musical names are upon every hill-side, in every glen; in the foaming cataract and on the bosom of the broad lake,—from the mountain top to the green islet in the midst of the waves, we listen to their silvery voices. “Ye say that all have passed away, The noble race and brave, That their light canoes have vanished From off the crested wave; That ’mid the forests where they roamed, There rings no hunters’ shout; But their name is on your waters, Ye may not wash it out. Ye say their cone-like cabins, That clustered o’er the vale, Have disappeared like withered leaves Before the autumn gale; But their memory liveth on your hills, Their baptism on your shore, Your ever living waters speak Their dialect of yore.” The several nations held nearly the same relationship to each other and the league, that the several States do to the Federal Government, and it has been said that they gave to our Fathers the idea of E Pluribus Unum.