"
Four leagues below French Creek, by a rock scratched with Indian
hieroglyphics, they buried another leaden plate. Three days after, they
reached the Delaware village of Attique, at the site of Kittanning,
whose twenty-two wigwams were all empty, the owners having fled. A
little farther on, at an old abandoned village of Shawanoes, they found
six English traders, whom they warned to begone, and return no more at
their peril. Being helpless to resist, the traders pretended obedience;
and Celoron charged them with a letter to the Governor of Pennsylvania,
in which he declared that he was "greatly surprised" to find Englishmen
trespassing on the domain of France. "I know," concluded the letter,
"that our Commandant-General would be very sorry to be forced to use
violence; but his orders are precise, to leave no foreign traders within
the limits of his government."[6]
[Footnote 6: Celoron, _Journal_. Compare the letter as translated in
_N.Y. Col. Docs_., VI. 532; also _Colonial Records of Pa_., V. 325.]
On the next day they reached a village of Iroquois under a female chief,
called Queen Alequippa by the English, to whom she was devoted. Both
Queen and subjects had fled; but among the deserted wigwams were six
more Englishmen, whom Celoron warned off like the others, and who, like
them, pretended to obey. At a neighboring town they found only two
withered ancients, male and female, whose united ages, in the judgment
of the chaplain, were full two centuries.
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