ainst
armed settlers, whose families followed them into the wilderness. Such a
war is inevitably bloody and cruel; but the inhuman love of cruelty for
cruelty's sake,[20] which marks the red Indian above all other savages,
rendered these wars more terrible than any others. For the hideous,
unnamable, unthinkable tortures practised by the red men on their
captured foes, and on their foes' tender women and helpless children,
were such as we read of in no other struggle, hardly even in the
revolting pages that tell the deeds of the Holy Inquisition. It was
inevitable--indeed it was in many instances proper--that such deeds
should awake in the breasts of the whites the grimmest, wildest spirit
of revenge and hatred.

The history of the border wars, both in the ways they were begun and in
the ways they were waged, make a long tale of injuries inflicted,
suffered, and mercilessly revenged. It could not be otherwise when
brutal, reckless, lawless borderers, despising all men not of their own
color, were thrown in contact with savages who esteemed cruelty and
treachery as the highest of virtues, and rapine and murder as the
worthiest of pursuits. Moreover, it was sadly inevitable that the
law-abiding borderer as well as the white ruffian, the peaceful Indian
as well as the painted marauder, should be plunged into the struggle to
suffer the punishment that should only have fallen on their evil-minded
fellows.

Looking back, it is easy to say that much of the wrong-doing could have
been prevented; but if we examine the facts to find out the truth, not
to establish a theory, we are bound to admit that the struggle was
really one that could not possibly have been avoided. The sentimental
historians speak as if the blame had been all ours, and the wrong all
done to our foes, and as if it would have been possible by any exercise
of wisdom to reconcile claims that were in their very essence
conflicting; but their utterances are as shallow as they are
untruthful.[21] Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of
the Alleghanies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground of
savages, war was inevitable; and even had we been willing, and had we
refrained from encroaching on the Indians' lands, the war would have
come nevertheless, for then the Indians themselves would have encroached
on ours. Undoubtedly we have wronged many tribes; but equally
undoubtedly our first definite knowledge of many others has been derived