The period of the earlier months of this year (1777) was not an auspicious one for the future of the settlers. During the latter half of the previous year, the Indians, dispersed in small bands, had spread destruction and dismay throughout the land, and the more exposed improvements were generally abandoned. It was the custom of many improvers to come out in the GREAT BRITAIN IN LEAGUE WITH THE INDIANS. 81 spring and extend their clearings, plant their seeds and fruit trees, gather in and consume the temporary supplies, and then return to spend the winter in the old colony, with a view to a permanent move of family and home at a safer day in the future. We read from Colonel Floyd's letter that Boonesborough was left with thirty guns but a few months before. The foresters did not return with re-enforcements at the opening of this season, as they did the last. The reduced settlers, however, were destined soon to be visited with incursions of more formidable bodies of Indians than had yet ventured to invade the disputed ground of strife. The war of the Revolution had now been in progress for nearly two years, since the hostile demonstrations at Lexington and Bunker's Hill. Six months ago, the Delaration of Independence was signed, and the vow for liberty or death found an echo of sympathy in the hearts of all true American colonists. It was more an obvious fact than an open secret that Great Britain was, from the frontier posts of Canada and the forts of Vincennes and Kaskaskia, not only furnishing the Miami tribes and their North-west confederates with arms and munitions of war, but inciting them with the arts and intrigue of unscrupulous diplomacy. They lured them with gifts and bribes to wage a war upon the feeble Kentucky colonies, which they well knew, after the Indian fashion, meant nothing less than butchery of men, women, and children, and mutilation and savage outrage, wherever it might be possible for them to commit such atrocities. Ashamed to license their own regular troops to violate the laws of civilized warfare, the English Government did not scruple to purchase and employ the cruelest of savages. to perform these revolting crimes against a people of their own kindred and blood, and with whom they were but recently allied in the fraternal bonds of a common citizenship. To add to the enormity of this national crime of the English Government, so often committed and repeated on the children of Kentucky, wherever her armies have invaded or her gold corrupted, the scenes of savage cruelty, aided and abetted by the French in the war ending with the treaty of Paris, in 1763, and perpetrated upon her own captive soldiers, were vivid and fresh upon the pages of her journals and military reports. The protest of her people against the barbarous cruelty of these should have restrained the fratricidal hand, and taught her not to neglect the quality of mercy in the policies of warfare against her own children, however wayward they seemed. We quote from the narrative of Colonel James Smith, an old Indian fighter, long a prisoner with the Indians, and for years a member of the Legislature of Pennsylvania, and who moved to and settled in Bourbon county, Kentucky, in 1788. He was a captive and an eye-witness of some of the cruelties of the Indians in the presence of French officers, at Fort Duquesne, now Pittsburgh, toward the English prisoners brought in after Braddock's defeat. He says:1 1 Collins, Vol. II., p. 78. "About sunset on the day of the battle, I heard at a distance the wellknown scalp hallo, followed by wild, quick, joyful shrieks, and accompanied by long-continued firing of guns. This too surely announced the fate of the day. About dusk, the party returned to the fort, driving before them twelve British regulars, stripped naked, and with their faces painted black, an evidence that the unhappy wretches were devoted to death. Next came the Indians, displaying their bloody scalps, of which they had immense numbers, and dressed in the scarlet coats, sashes, and military hats of the officers and soldiers. Behind all came a train of baggage-horses, ladened with piles of booty and scalps, canteens, and all the accoutrements of British soldiers. The savages appeared frantic with joy, and when I beheld them entering the fort, dancing, yelling, and brandishing their red tomahawks, and waving their scalps in the air, while the great guns of the fort replied to the incessant discharge of rifles without, it looked as if h-ll had given a holiday, and turned loose its inhabitants. The most melancholy spectacle was the band of prisoners. They were dejected and anxious. Poor fellows! they had but a few months before left London, at the command of their superiors, and we may easily imagine their feelings at the strange and dreadful spectacle around them. The yells of delight and congratulation were scarcely over, when those of vengeance began. The devoted prisoners - British regulars—were led out from the fort to the banks of the Alleghany, and to the eternal disgrace of the French commandant, were burnt to death at the stake, one after another, with the most awful tortures. I stood upon the battlements and witnessed the shocking spectacle. The prisoner was tied to a stake, with his hands raised above his head, stripped naked, and surrounded by Indians. They would touch him with red-hot irons, and stick his body full of pine splinters and set them on fire, drowning the shrieks of the victim in the yells of delight with which they danced around him. His companions in the meantime stood in a group near the stake, and had a foretaste of what was in store for each one of them. As fast as one prisoner died under his tortures, another filled his place, until the whole perished. All this took place so near the fort that every scream of the victims must have rung in the ears of the French commandant." All this nature and usage of these savages in war were familiar to the mind and experience of the British Government and its military representatives. To add intensity to the repugnant horror which should have restrained them from engaging such allies or instruments to war upon the exposed and unsheltered frontiersmen, they knew that these and like barbarous atrocities, which had sealed in death the tortures of captive British soldiers at Fort Duquesne, would not only be visited upon the citizen soldiers of Kentucky, but on the aged non-combatant, the sainted pure mother and maiden, and the cradling infant as well. Hundreds of spots in Kentucky are stained with the blood of these innocents, murdered by Indian rifle, or arrow, or tomahawk, to appease the cruel vengeance of England's rulers against her |