st of the details of his
history and the traits of his character. The truth about him seems to
be that he had really become a savage, and it would not be strange if he
felt all the ferocity of a savage, together with the rare and capricious
emotions of pity and generosity which are apt to visit the savage heart.
There have always been good Indians and bad Indians, and Simon Girty was
simply a bad Indian.

VIII. THE WICKEDEST DEED IN OUR HISTORY.

The Indians despised the white men for what they thought their stupidity
in warfare, when they stood up in the open to be shot at, as the
soldiers who were sent against them mostly did, instead of taking
to trees and hiding in tall grass and hollows of the ground, as the
backwoodsmen learned to do. Smith tells us that when Tecaughretanego
heard how Colonel Grant, in the second campaign against Fort Duquesne,
outwitted the French and Indians by night and stole possession of a hill
overlooking the post, he praised his craft as that of a true warrior;
but as to his letting his pipers play at daybreak, and give the enemy
notice of his presence, so that the Indians could take to trees and
shoot his Highlanders down with no danger to themselves, he could only
suppose that Colonel Grant had got drunk over night.

The savages respected the whites when they showed cunning, and they did
not hate them the more for not showing mercy in fight; but we have seen
how fiercely they resented the crime of horse stealing in Kenton's case,
though they were always stealing horses themselves from the settlers;
and any deed of treachery against themselves they were eager and prompt
to punish, though they were always doing such deeds against their
enemies. Still, it is doubtful whether with all their malignity they
were ever guilty of anything so abominable as the massacre of the
Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten, by the Americans; and if there is
record of any wickeder act in the history not only of Ohio, but of the
whole United States, I do not know of it. The Spaniards may have outdone
it in some of their dealings with the Indians, but I cannot call to mind
any act of theirs that seems so black, so wholly without justice and
without reason. It is no wonder that it embittered the hostilities
between the red men and the white men and made the war, which outlasted
our Revolution ten years, more and more unmerciful to the very end.

The missionaries of the Moravian Church were more successful t