nsylvania frontier to Kentucky. They stole horses, burned houses,
and killed or carried into a dreadful captivity men, women, and
children. The inroads were as usual marked by stealth, rapine, and
horrible cruelty. It is hard for those accustomed only to treat of
civilized warfare to realize the intolerable nature of these ravages,
the fact that the loss and damage to the whites was out of all
proportion to the strength of the Indian war parties, and the extreme
difficulty in dealing an effective counter stroke.

The immense tangled forests increased beyond measure the difficulties of
the problem. Under their shelter the Indians were able to attack at will
and without warning, and though they would fight to the death against
any odds when cornered, they invariably strove to make their attacks on
the most helpless, on those who were powerless to resist. It was not the
armed frontier levies, it was the immigrants coming in by pack train or
by flat boat,--it was the unsuspecting settlers with their wives and
little ones who had most to fear from an Indian fray; while, when once
the blow was delivered, the savages vanished as smoke vanishes in the
open. A small war party could thus work untold harm in a district
precisely as a couple of man-eating jaguars may depopulate a forest
village in tropical America; and many men and much time had to be spent
before they could be beaten into submission, exactly as it needs a great
hunting party to drive from their fastness and slay the big man-eating
cats, though, if they came to bay in the open, they could readily be
killed by a single skilful and resolute hunter.

Warfare of the Settlers.

Each settlement or group of settlements had to rely on the prowess of
its own hunter-soldiers for safety. The real war, the war in which by
far the greatest loss was suffered by both sides, was that thus waged
man against man. These innumerable and infinitely varied skirmishes, as
petty as they were bloody, were not so decisive at the moment as the
campaigns against the gathered tribes, but were often more important in
their ultimate results. Under the incessant strain of the incessant
warfare there arose here and there Indian fighters of special note, men
who warred alone, or at the head of small parties of rangers, and who
not only defended the settlements, but kept the Indian villages and the
Indian war parties in constant dread by their vengeful retaliatory
inroads. These men became the