They repeated the same ceremony at the mouth of the
Muskingum. Here, half a century later, when this region belonged to the
United States, a party of boys, bathing in the river, saw the plate
protruding from the bank where the freshets had laid it bare, knocked it
down with a long stick, melted half of it into bullets, and gave what
remained to a neighbor from Marietta, who, hearing of this mysterious
relic, inscribed in an unknown tongue, came to rescue it from their
hands.[8] It is now in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian
Society.[9] On the eighteenth of August, Celoron buried yet another
plate, at the mouth of the Great Kenawha. This, too, in the course of a
century, was unearthed by the floods, and was found in 1846 by a boy at
play, by the edge of the water.[10] The inscriptions on all these plates
were much alike, with variations of date and place.
[Footnote 8: O.H. Marshall, in _Magazine of American History, March,_
1878.]
[Footnote 9: For papers relating to it, see _Trans. Amer. Antiq. Soc_.,
II.]
[Footnote 10: For a facsimile of the inscription on this plate, see
_Olden Time,_ I. 288. Celoron calls the Kenawha, _Chinodahichetha_. The
inscriptions as given in his Journal correspond with those on the plates
discovered.]
The weather was by turns rainy and hot; and the men, tired and famished,
were fast falling ill. On the twenty-second they approached Scioto,
called by the French St.
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