Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/151

 carrying their dead and wounded with them according to their invariable custom; as, like the ancient Greeks, they deem it an {124} irreparable disgrace, to leave the unburied bodies of their slain fellow warriours to the disposal of the victorious enemy. The Americans bought their victory at the expense of a number of their most active men, amongst whom was Col. Lewis, brother to the general, a brave and enterprizing officer. They were buried near the edge of the river bank, which has since mouldered away, occasionally discovering their remains to the present inhabitants, who have always re-interred them.

This was a military station above thirty years ago. It is twenty years since it was laid out for a town, but it had no houses erected in consequence until after Wayne's Indian treaty, it being unsafe before to live outside the stoccado.

Lord Dunmore, who was then governour of Virginia, and commander in chief on the expedition against the Indians, at the time of the battle of Point Pleasant, had penetrated by the way of Wheeling across the Ohio, to within a short march of their principal settlement, near where Chilicothe now is; when, instead of following up Lewis's success, while they were yet under the influence of the panick occasioned by it, and by his lordship's approach with the main body of the militia, and of exterminating them, or of driving them out of the country, he received their submission and patched up a treaty with them, which they observed no longer than during the short time that he continued with a military force in their country, for which he was much blamed by the back settlers and hunters. Humanity, however, must plead his excuse with every thinking or philosophick mind; and volumes might be written to prove the justice of the Indian cause; but in all national concerns, it has never been controverted by the history of mankind from the earliest ages of which we have any record, but that in