r. The Virginians
accused the traders of being the main cause of the difficulty,[8]
asserting that they sometimes incited the Indians to outrages, and
always, even in the midst of hostilities, kept them supplied with guns
and ammunition, and even bought from them the horses that they had
stolen on their plundering expeditions against the Virginian border.[9]
These last accusations were undoubtedly justified, at least in great
part, by the facts. The interests of the white trader from Pennsylvania
and of the white settler from Virginia were so far from being identical
that they were usually diametrically opposite.

The northwestern Indians had been nominally at peace with the whites for
ten years, since the close of Bouquet's campaign. But Bouquet had
inflicted a very slight punishment upon them, and in concluding an
unsatisfactory peace had caused them to make but a partial reparation
for the wrongs they had done.[10] They remained haughty and insolent,
irritated rather than awed by an ineffective chastisement, and their
young men made frequent forays on the frontier. Each of the ten years of
nominal peace saw plenty of bloodshed. Recently they had been seriously
alarmed by the tendency of the whites to encroach on the great
hunting-grounds south of the Ohio;[11] for here and there hunters or
settlers were already beginning to build cabins along the course of that
stream. The cession by the Iroquois of these same hunting-grounds, at
the treaty of Fort Stanwix, while it gave the whites a colorable title,
merely angered the northwestern Indians. Half a century earlier they
would hardly have dared dispute the power of the Six Nations to do what
they chose with any land that could be reached by their war parties; but
in 1774 they felt quite able to hold their own against their old
oppressors, and had no intention of acquiescing in any arrangement the
latter might make, unless it was also clearly to their own advantage.

In the decade before Lord Dunmore's war there had been much mutual
wrong-doing between the northwestern Indians and the Virginian
borderers; but on the whole the latter had occupied the position of
being sinned against more often than that of sinning. The chief offence
of the whites was that they trespassed upon uninhabited lands, which
they forthwith proceeded to cultivate, instead of merely roaming over
them to hunt the game and butcher one another. Doubtless occasional
white men would murder an Indian if