n to the honest execution of the public trusts confided
to them. Nor is this all. There has ever been found upon the western
frontiers, a band of unprincipled men who have set at defiance the laws
of the United States, debauched the Indians with ardent spirits,
cheated them of their property, and then committed upon them
aggressions marked with all the cruelty and wanton bloodshed which have
distinguished the career of the savage. The history of these
aggressions would fill a volume. It is only necessary to recall to the
mind of the reader, the horrible murder of the Conestoga Indians, in
December 1763, by some Pennsylvanians; the dark tragedy enacted on the
banks of he Muskingum, at a later period, when the Moravian Indians, at
the three villages of Schoenbrun, Salem, and Gnadenhuetten, were first
disarmed and then deliberately tomahawked by Williamson and his
associates; the unprovoked murder of the family of Logan; the
assassination of Bald Eagle, of the gallant and high-souled Cornstalk,
and his son Elinipsico: we need but recall these, from the long
catalogue of similar cases, to satisfy every candid mind, that rapine,
cruelty and a thirst for human blood are not peculiarly the attributes
of the American Indian.

But there are still other causes which have aroused and kept in
activity, the warlike passions of the Indians. They have been
successively subjected to English, Dutch, French and Spanish influence.
The agents of these different powers, as well as the emigrants from
them, either from interest or a spirit of mischievous hostility, have
repeatedly prompted the Indians to arm themselves against the United
States. The great principle of the Indian wars, for the last seventy
years, has been the preservation of their lands. On this, the French,
English and Spanish have in turn excited them to active resistance
against the expanding settlements of the whites. It was on the
principle of recovering their lands, that the French were their allies
between the commencement of hostilities with the colonies, in 1754, and
the peace of 1762; and subsequently kept up an excitement among them
until the beginning of the revolution. From this period, the English
took the place of the French, and instigated them in a similar manner.
Their views and feelings on this point, may be gathered from their own
words:

"It was we," say the Delawares, Mohicans and their kindred tribes, "who
so kindly received the Europeans on their firs