" of the Indian allies of
the French in Canada, says the historian, gave birth to these humane and
nicely-graduated enactments! Nor is our admiration of their Christian
spirit in the least diminished, when we reflect that nothing is recorded
in history of "bounties on scalps" or "encouragement" to murder, offered
by Frontenac, or any other French-Canadian governor, as a revenge for
the horrible massacre at Montreal, or the many "fruitless cruelties" of
the bloody Iroquois![71]

The descendants of the men who gave these "bounties" and
"encouragements," have, in our own day, caressed, and wept and lamented
over the tawny murderer, Black-Hawk, and his "wrongs" and "misfortunes;"
but the theatre of Indian warfare was then removed a little farther
west; and the atrocities of Haverhill and Deerfield were perpetrated on
the western prairies, and not amid the forests of the east! Yet I do not
mean, by referring to this passage of history--or to the rivers of
wasted sentiment poured out a few years ago--so much to condemn our
forefathers, or to draw invidious comparisons between them and others,
as to show, that the war of extermination, sometimes waged by western
rangers, was not without example--that the cruelty and hatred of the
pioneer to the barbarous Indian, might originate in exasperation, which
even moved the puritans; and that the lamentations, over the fictitious
"wrongs" of a turbulent and bloody savage, might have run in a channel
nearer home.

Hatred of the Indian, among the pioneers, was hereditary; there was
scarcely a man on the frontier, who had not lost a father, a mother, or
a brother, by the tomahawk; and not a few of them had suffered in their
own persons. The child, who learned the rudiments of his scanty
education at his mother's knee, must decipher the strange characters by
the straggling light which penetrated the crevices between the logs;
for, while the father was absent, in the field or on the war-path, the
mother was obliged to bar the doors and barricade the windows against
the savages. Thus, if he did not literally imbibe it with his mother's
milk, one of the first things the pioneer learned, was dread, and
consequently hatred, of the Indian. That feeling grew with his growth,
strengthened with his strength--for a life upon the western border left
but few days free from sights of blood or mementoes of the savage. The
pioneer might go to the field in the morning, unsuspecting; and, at
noon, retu