te: Draper MSS. Wm. Clark
Papers. N. T. Dalton to W. Clark, Vincennes, Aug. 23, 1788; also Denny,
p. 528.]

Dreadful Nature of the Warfare.

The war bands who harried the settlements, or lurked along the banks of
the Ohio, bent on theft and murder, did terrible deeds, and at times
suffered terrible fates in return, when some untoward chance threw them
in the way of the grim border vengeance. The books of the old annalists
are filled with tales of disaster and retribution, of horrible suffering
and of fierce prowess. Countless stories are told of heroic fight and
panic rout; of midnight assault on lonely cabins, and ambush of
heavy-laden immigrant scows; of the deaths of brave men and cowards, and
the dreadful butchery of women and children; of bloody raid and
revengeful counter stroke. Sometimes a band of painted marauders would
kill family after family, without suffering any loss, would capture boat
after boat without effective resistance from the immigrants, paralyzed
by panic fright, and would finally escape unmolested, or beat off with
ease a possibly larger party of pursuers, who happened to be ill led, or
to be men with little training in wilderness warfare.

At other times all this might be reversed. A cabin might be defended
with such maddened courage by some stout rifleman, fighting for his
cowering wife and children, that a score of savages would recoil
baffled, leaving many of their number dead. A boat's crew of resolute
men might beat back, with heavy loss, an over-eager onslaught of Indians
in canoes, or push their slow, unwieldy craft from shore under a rain of
rifle-balls, while the wounded oarsmen strained at the bloody handles of
the sweeps, and the men who did not row gave shot for shot, firing at
the flame tongues in the dark woods. A party of scouts, true wilderness
veterans, equal to their foes in woodcraft and cunning, and superior in
marksmanship and reckless courage, might follow and scatter some war
band and return in triumph with scalps and retaken captives and horses.

Deeds of a War Party.

A volume could readily be filled with adventures of this kind, all
varying infinitely in detail, but all alike in their bloody ferocity.
During the years 1789 and 1790 scores of Indian war parties went on such
trips, to meet every kind of success and failure. The deeds of one such,
which happen to be recorded, may be given merely to serve as a sample of
what happened in countless other cases.