Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 8).djvu/84

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MILITARY ROADS

joined the Indian confederacy regardless of their promises.

It is interesting to note at the outset that the savages to whom the attention of the nation was now about to be attracted were styled, generally, the "Northwestern Indians." The significance of this is that now, when at last run to bay, the final campaigns in that long series of conflicts begun by Washington and Braddock and Forbes on the heads of the Ohio (1754–58), continued by Bouquet on the Muskingum (1764), Dunmore on the Scioto (1774), Crawford on the Sandusky (1781), and Clark on the Miami (1782), were to be fought to a triumphant conclusion in the region of the Wabash. These savages were the same that had ever fought the advancing fire-line of civilization—the Miamis, Delawares, Shawanese, Wyandots, and their confederates. Driven westward for nearly half a century, they made a final stand at the western extremity of Lake Erie, almost under the guns of the British forts, and are known collectively now in 1790 as the "Northwestern Indians." The story of our actual conquest of the interior of Amer-