Dismayed and disgraced, the Delawares retired from the green maize fields which they loved, and fell back, a crowd of disordered fugitives, into the Alleghany forests. Sifting through the forests, crowding the Shawanese before them, they at last crossed the Allegheny and settled down on the upper Muskingum, about 1740. Here they lived for half a century, fighting with Villiers and Pontiac and Little Turtle. Here they were visited by armies, and by missionaries who did noble work among them. The Delawares, later, fought against the armies of Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne, after they abandoned the valley which was first their home, and then sank hopelessly into the general rout of the broken tribes moving westward after the battles of Fallen Timbers and Tippecanoe. On the Kansas river and its tributaries the remnant of the once powerful Lenni-Lenape range today over a territory of a million acres, still dreaming, it is said, of a time when they will again assume their historic position at the head of the Indian family. A great mass of tradition lives with them of their eastward conquest, the homes on the Delaware, Allegheny, and Muskingum, where the poet had Evangeline visit them in her search of Gabriel. And still the massacre of Gnadenhutten is told to wondering children in Delaware wigwams which dot the Ozark mountains as they once dotted the Alleghany valleys.
The total number of Indians in the hunting-ground of the Iroquois would be difficult to estimate. During the Revolutionary War, when the Central West was filled with a hundred fugitive tribes, a United States commissioner reported the number of Indians affiliated with the Iroquois as 3,100, divided as follows: Wyandots, 300, Mingoes, 600, Senecas, 650, Mohawks, 100, Cuyahogas, 220, Onondagas, 230, Oneidas and Tuscarawas, 400, Ottawas, 600; the other nations were given as follows: Chippewas, 5,000, Pottawatomies, 400; scattering, 800. Considering the Indian family as consisting of four persons, the total Indian population east of the Mississippi would be 40,000, probably a very liberal estimate.
In the year fifteen hundred and forty, Jacques Cartier raised a white cross crowned with the _fleur-de-lis_ of France upon an improvised altar of crossed canoe paddles at Quebec, bearing the inscription "_Franciscus Primus, Dei gratia, Francorum Rex Regnat_," and formally took possession of a new continent. Two centuries later, in the dawn of early morning, British soldiers wrested from the betrayed Montcalm the mist-enshrouded height where that emblazoned cross had stood, and New France fell--"amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin."