The Winning of the West, Volume Four | Page 9

walls and tortured him to death. The torture began at midnight, and the
screams of the wretched victim were heard until daylight. [Footnote:
McBride, I., 88.]
Difficulties Discriminating between Hostile and Friendly Indians.
Until this year the war was not general. One of the most bewildering
problems to be solved by the Federal officers on the Ohio was to find
out which tribes were friendly and which hostile. Many of the
inveterate enemies of the Americans were as forward in professions of
friendship as the peaceful Indians, were just as apt to be found at the
treaties, or lounging about the settlements; and this widespread
treachery and deceit made the task of the army officers puzzling to a
degree. As for the frontiersmen, who had no means whatever of telling
a hostile from a friendly tribe, they followed their usual custom and
lumped all the Indians, good and bad, together; for which they could
hardly be blamed. Even St. Clair, who had small sympathy with the
backwoodsmen, acknowledged [Footnote: American State Papers, IV.,
58.] that they could not and ought not to submit patiently to the
cruelties and depredations of the savages; "they are in the habit of
retaliation, perhaps without attending precisely to the nations from
which the injuries are received," said he. A long course of such
aggressions and retaliations resulted, by the year 1791, in all the
Northwestern Indians going on the war-path. The hostile tribes had
murdered and plundered the frontiersmen; the vengeance of the latter,
as often as not, had fallen on friendly tribes; and these justly angered
friendly tribes usually signalized their taking the red hatchet by some
act of treacherous hostility directed against the settlers who had not
molested them.

Treachery of the Friendly Delawares.
In the late winter of 1791 the hitherto friendly Delawares who hunted
or traded along the western frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia
proper took this manner of showing that they had joined the open foes
of the Americans. A big band of warriors spread up and down the
Alleghany for about forty miles, and on the 9th of February attacked all
the outlying settlements. The Indians who delivered this attack had
long been on intimate terms with the Alleghany settlers, who were
accustomed to see them in and about their houses; and as the savages
acted with seeming friendship to the last moment, they were able to
take the settlers completely unawares, so that no effective resistance
was made. [Footnote: "American Pioneer," I., 44; Narrative of John
Brickell.] Some settlers were killed and some captured. Among the
captives was a lad named John Brickell, who, though at first maltreated,
and forced to run the gauntlet, was afterwards adopted into the tribe,
and was not released until after Wayne's victory. After his adoption, he
was treated with the utmost kindness, and conceived a great liking for
his captors, admiring their many good qualities, especially their
courage and their kindness to their children. Long afterwards he wrote
down his experiences, which possess a certain value as giving, from the
Indian standpoint, an account of some of the incidents of the forest
warfare of the day.
Utter Untrustworthiness of the Indians.
The warriors who had engaged in this raid on their former friends, the
settlers along the Alleghany. retreated two or three days' journey into
the wilderness to an appointed place, where they found their families.
One of the Girtys was with the Indians. No sooner had the last of the
warriors come in, with their scalps and prisoners, including the boy
Brickell, than ten of their number deliberately started back to
Pittsburgh, to pass themselves as friendly Indians, and trade. In a
fortnight they returned laden with goods of various kinds, including
whiskey. Some of the inhabitants, sore from disaster, suspected that
these Indians were only masquerading as friendly, and prepared to
attack them; but one of the citizens warned them of their danger and
they escaped. Their effrontery was as remarkable as their treachery and
duplicity. They had suddenly attacked and massacred settlers by whom
they had never been harmed, and with whom they preserved an

appearance of entire friendship up to the very moment of the assault.
Then, their hands red with the blood of their murdered friends, they
came boldly into Pittsburgh, among the near neighbors of these same
murdered men, and stayed there several days to trade, pretending to be
peaceful allies of the whites. With savages so treacherous and so
ferocious it was a mere impossibility for the borderers to distinguish
the hostile from the friendly, as they hit out blindly to revenge the
blows that fell upon them from unknown hands. Brutal though the
frontiersmen often were, they never employed the systematic and
deliberate bad faith which was a favorite weapon with even the best of