Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/343

Rh nerved many chieftains and their tribes to attempt what to them doubtless appeared a possible enterprise, if they entered upon it pledged to triumph or to death. An Iroquois sachem, at a conference in Philadelphia in 1761, referring to the traps already set by the French, about to be re-baited by the English, said: “We are penned up like hogs. There are forts all around us: we feel that death is coming upon us.” The conspiracy, the whole aim of which from the first was futile and impossible, was nevertheless successful in many of its details, and in the sum and shape of the horrors attendant upon that success. The siege and destruction of the lake and river forts, and then a ruthless rage of slaughter, havoc, and burning on the whole belt of frontier settlements, were the elements of that savage campaign against civilization. The forts at Detroit and at the present Pittsburg, on the forks of the Ohio, alone held out, and then only through sharp straits of peril and almost superhuman endurance, against the Indian foe, lurking everywhere with a lynx-eyed glare and a crimson ferocity. The pent-up garrisons in these two defended posts, starved and sleepless, listened as messengers, like those to Job, brought tidings of woe from all the rest.

In the mean time the adventurous settlers who had scattered themselves on either side of the Alleghanies, accepting the rough conditions of frontier life and well matched in resource and forest skill with the natives, were subjected to the fury of the wily and sanguinary foe. The horrors of those appalling scenes and events, in ghastly butcherings, tortures, and mutilations, with the sack and burning of the rude homesteads, and the hunting in the woods for the wretched, starving fugitives, have left records in our history of the most dismal and dreary tragedies. It was then and there that — midway in our country's history — men, women, and children came to know the meaning and character of Indian warfare. Then and