Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/370

350 are profoundly impressed by the prowess, heroism, outlay of arduous effort and exhaustive toil by the English and provincial forces. Their work was in gloomy and almost impenetrable forests, often pathless and treacherous, beset by ambushed foes, whose stealthy tread was as noiseless as their fiendish shrieks and yellings were appalling, when they broke from the woods with tomahawk and scalping-knife upon their wretched victims. The policy of all the European colonists — whether their main object was the occupation of interior territory in their rivalry for possession, or to secure a centre of trade with the Indians — was to push forward armed parties, with supplies, to seize strategic posts for strongholds. These were advanced beyond the actual settlements, and were planted at the forks or near the sources of rivers, at portages, and on favoring sites on the shores of lakes. These forts were defended and protected as well as circumstances would permit. They would have been but as houses of cards in the warfare of civilized men; but they were of service against the simple tactics of the savage. A blockhouse of solid timber, with rude barracks, a magazine, a well, the whole surrounded by a high stockade with loopholes, — such was the wilderness fort. They were designed to admit of communication with each other, and so with the centres of civilization, whence from time to time supplies and reinforcements for their garrisons might be brought to them. Often when there were any outlying and scattered settlements near these defended posts, the dismayed and perilled frontier families, or fugitives escaping from a massacre, would flee to them for a refuge. When the savages in their rage and rapacity were lurking around one of these exposed forts, or daringly besieging it with their crafty demand for a parley, or their mocking taunts and hideous bellowings, they racked their barbarous ingenuity for means for outwitting the hated white man. Night and day the slender garrison, often weak from scant fare and exhausted by sleeplessness,