The first of these nations to enter the old hunting-ground of the Iroquois was the Wyandot. Their home was about Sandusky Bay, and along the shores of the Sandusky river. Originally the Wyandots dwelt on the upper St. Lawrence, and were neighbors of the Seneca tribe of the Six Nations. As the result of a quarrel over a maiden, as legend has it, but more likely as result of Iroquois conquest, the Wyandots were driven from their homes, vanishing westward into the land of the Hurons, who lived by the lake which bore their name. Here the brave Jesuit missionaries found them, where they were known as the Tobacco Nation. The confederation of the Iroquois as the Six Nations sounded the doom of the Hurons, and with the Senecas at the head of the confederacy, only ruin stared the fugitive Wyandots in the face. By the beginning of the eighteenth century they had again fled westward, hopelessly seeking a new refuge. Some of the nation continued journeying even beyond the Sioux and Dacotahs to the "Back-bone of the World," as they called the Rocky Mountains. There, tradition states, they found wanderers like themselves, who spoke a familiar language--Wyandots who had come hither long before to escape the revengeful Senecas! But the majority of the nation built great rafts and set float on the Detroit river. This was a reckless alternative to choose, but it brought the persecuted nation to their long-sought place of refuge. As they passed the present site of Detroit they saw with amazement an array of white tents and soldiers dressed in white, keeping watch. The Wyandots had found the French building a fort, and fear of the Senecas vanished. On the shores of neighboring Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie the Wyandots built their fires, and the relations between them and the French were most cordial. The year of this memorable Wyandot hegira is given as 1701, which, fortunately, corresponds with the founding of Detroit. When Mad Anthony Wayne was waging his last campaign against the western Indians in 1794, he once summoned to him a knowing frontiersman and asked him if he could not capture an Indian in order to get some information concerning the enemy. "Can you not capture one near Sandusky?" asked the general, as the man hesitated. "No, not Sandusky," was the ready reply. "And why not at Sandusky?" "There are only Wyandots at Sandusky." "Well, why will not a Wyandot do?" insisted the irrepressible Wayne. "Because, Sir," replied the woodsman, "a Wyandot is never captured alive."