Having distributed gifts among the Indians, the French proceeded on their way, and at or near the mouth of Wheeling Creek buried another plate of lead.  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. Yotoc, or Sinioto, a large Shawanoe town at the mouth of the river which bears the same name.  Greatly doubting what welcome awaited them, they filled their powderhorns and prepared for the worst.  Joncaire was sent forward to propitiate the inhabitants; but they shot bullets through the flag that he carried, and surrounded him, yelling and brandishing their knives.  Some were for killing him at once; others for burning him alive.  The interposition of a friendly Iroquois saved him; and at length they let him go.  Celoron was very uneasy at the reception of his messenger.  “I knew,” he writes, “the weakness of my party, two thirds of which were young men who had never left home before, and would all have run at the sight of ten Indians.  Still, there was nothing for me but to keep on; for I was short of provisions, my canoes were badly damaged, and I had no pitch or bark to mend them.  So I embarked again, ready for whatever might happen.  I had good officers, and about fifty men who could be trusted.”