r shame and
regret; yet it is only fair to keep in mind the terrible provocations
they had endured. Mercy, pity, magnanimity to the fallen, could not be
expected from the frontiersmen gathered together to war against an
Indian tribe. Almost every man of such a band had bitter personal wrongs
to avenge. He was not taking part in a war against a civilized foe; he
was fighting in a contest where women and children suffered the fate of
the strong men, and instead of enthusiasm for his country's flag and a
general national animosity towards its enemies, he was actuated by a
furious flame of hot anger, and was goaded on by memories of which
merely to think was madness. His friends had been treacherously slain
while on messages of peace; his house had been burned, his cattle driven
off, and all he had in the world destroyed before he knew that war
existed and when he felt quite guiltless of all offence; his sweetheart
or wife had been carried off, ravished, and was at the moment the slave
and concubine of some dirty and brutal Indian warrior; his son, the stay
of his house, had been burned at the stake with torments too horrible to
mention;[24] his sister, when ransomed and returned to him, had told of
the weary journey through the woods, when she carried around her neck as
a horrible necklace the bloody scalps of her husband and children;[25]
seared into his eyeballs, into his very brain, he bore ever with him,
waking or sleeping, the sight of the skinned, mutilated, hideous body of
the baby who had just grown old enough to recognize him and to crow and
laugh when taken in his arms. Such incidents as these were not
exceptional; one or more, and often all of them, were the invariable
attendants of every one of the countless Indian inroads that took place
during the long generations of forest warfare. It was small wonder that
men who had thus lost every thing should sometimes be fairly crazed by
their wrongs. Again and again on the frontier we hear of some such
unfortunate who has devoted all the remainder of his wretched life to
the one object of taking vengeance on the whole race of the men who had
darkened his days forever. Too often the squaws and pappooses fell
victims of the vengeance that should have come only on the warriors; for
the whites regarded their foes as beasts rather than men, and knew that
the squaws were more cruel than others in torturing the prisoner, and
that the very children took their full part therein,