n, and
children that were within their walls. More than a hundred years have
passed since this deed of revolting brutality; but even now a just man's
blood boils in his veins at the remembrance. It is impossible not to
regret that fate failed to send some strong war party of savages across
the path of these inhuman cowards, to inflict on them the punishment
they so richly deserved. We know that a few of them were afterwards
killed by the Indians; it is a matter of keen regret that any escaped.

When the full particulars of the affair were known, all the best leaders
of the border, almost all the most famous Indian fighters, joined in
denouncing it. [Footnote: Col. James Smith, then of Kentucky, in 1799
calls it "an act of barbarity equal to any thing I ever knew to be
committed by the savages themselves, except the burning of prisoners."]
Nor is it right that the whole of the frontier folk should bear the
blame for the deed. It is a fact, honorable and worthy of mention, that
the Kentuckians were never implicated in this or any similar massacre.
[Footnote: The Germans of up-country North Carolina were guilty of as
brutal massacres as the Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania. See
Adair, 245. There are two or three individual instances of the barbarity
of Kentuckians--one being to the credit of McGarry,--but they are
singularly few, when the length and the dreadful nature of their Indian
wars are taken into account. Throughout their history the Kentucky
pioneers had the right on their side in their dealings with the Indians.
They were not wanton aggressors; they entered upon vacant
hunting-grounds, to which no tribe had a clear title, and to which most
even of the doubtful titles had been fairly extinguished. They fought
their foes fiercely, with varying fortune, and eventually wrested the
land from them; but they very rarely wronged them; and for the numerous
deeds of fearful cruelty that were done on Kentucky soil, the Indians
were in almost every case to blame.]

But at the time, and in their own neighborhood--the corner of the Upper
Ohio valley where Pennsylvania and Virginia touch,--the conduct of the
murderers of the Moravians roused no condemnation. The borderers at
first felt about it as the English Whigs originally felt about the
massacre of Glencoe. For some time the true circumstances of the affair
were not widely known among them. They were hot with wrath against all
the red-skinned race; and they rejoic