“A delegation of warriors from the Delaware tribe having visited the governor of Virginia during the revolution, on matters of business, the governor asked them some questions relative to their country, and, among others, what they knew or had heard of the animal whose bones were found at the Salt-licks, on the Ohio. Their chief speaker immediately put himself into an attitude of oratory, and with a pomp suited to what he conceived the elevation of his subject, informed him, that it was a tradition handed down from their fathers, that in ancient times a herd of these tremendous animals came to the Bick-bone-licks, and began a universal destruction of the bear, deer, elk, buffalo, and other animals which had been created for the use of the Indians. That the Great Man above looking down and seeing this, was so enraged, that he seized his lightning, descended on the earth, seated himself on a neighbouring mountain, on a rock, of which his seat and the prints of his feet are still to be seen, and hurled his bolts among them, till the whole were slaughtered, except the big bull, who, presenting his forehead to the shafts, shook them off as they fell, but missing one, at length it wounded him in the side, whereon, springing round, he bounded over the Ohio, over the Wabash, the Illinois, and finally over the great lakes, where he is living at this day.”—Jefferson’s _Notes on Virginia_. NOTE TO PAGE 65. _Scorning to wield the hatchet for his bribe,_ _’Gainst Brandt himself I went to battle forth._ I took the character of Brandt in the poem of “Gertrude” from the common Histories of England, all of which represented him as a bloody and bad man (even among savages), and chief agent in the horrible desolation of Wyoming. Some years after this poem appeared, the son of Brandt, a most interesting and intelligent youth, came over to England, and I formed an acquaintance with him, on which I still look back with pleasure. He appealed to my sense of honour and justice, on his own part and on that of his sister, to retract the unfair aspersions which, unconscious of its unfairness, I had cast on his father’s memory. He then referred me to documents which completely satisfied me that the common accounts of Brandt’s cruelties at Wyoming, which I had found in books of Travels and in Adolphus’s and similar Histories of England, were gross errors, and that, in point of fact, Brandt was not even present at that scene of desolation.