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 the red tribes.

The Federal Authorities Misjudge the Settlers.

The people who were out of reach of the Indian tomahawk, and especially the Federal officers, were often unduly severe in judging the borderers for their deeds of retaliation, Brickell's narrative shows that the parties of seemingly friendly Indians who came in to trade were sometimes—and indeed in this year 1791 it was probable they were generally—composed of Indians who were engaged in active hostilities against the settlers, and who were always watching for a chance to murder and plunder. On March 9th, a month after the Delawares had begun their attacks, the grim backwoods captain Brady, with some of his Virginian rangers, fell on a party of them who had come to a block-house to trade, and killed four. The Indians asserted that they were friendly, and both the Federal Secretary of War and the Governor of Pennsylvania denounced the deed, and threatened the offenders; but the frontiersmen stood by them. [Footnote: State Department MSS., Washington Papers, Ex. C., p. 11, etc. Presly Neville to Richard Butler, March 19, 1791; Isaac Craig to Secretary of War, March 16, 1791; Secretary of War to President, March 31, 1791.] Soon afterwards a delegation of chiefs from the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois arrived at Fort Pitt, and sent a message to the President, complaining of the murder of these alleged friendly Indians. [Footnote: American State Papers, IV., 145, Cornplanter and others to the President, March 17, 1791.] On the very day these Seneca chiefs started on their journey home another Delaware war party killed nine settlers, men, women, and children, within twenty miles of Fort Pitt; which so enraged the people of the neighborhood that the lives of the Senecas were jeopardized. The United States authorities were particularly anxious to keep at peace with the Six Nations, and made repeated efforts to treat with them; but the Six Nations stood sullenly aloof, afraid to enter openly into the struggle, and yet reluctant to make a firm peace or cede any of their lands. [Footnote: State Department MSS., Washington Papers, Knox to the President, April 10, 1791; American State Papers, IV., pp. 139-170, 225-233, 477-482, etc.]

Intimate Relations of the British and Indians.

The intimate relations between the Indians and the British at the Lake Posts continued to perplex and anger the Americans. While the frontiers were being mercilessly ravaged, the same Indians who were committing the ravages met in council with the British agent, Alexander McKee, at the Miami Rapids; the council being held in this neighborhood for the special benefit of the very towns which were most hostile to the Americans, and which had been partially destroyed by Harmar the preceding fall. The Indian war was at its height, and the murderous forays never ceased throughout the spring and summer. McKee came to Miami in April, and was forced to wait nearly three months, because of the absence of the Indian war parties, before the principal chiefs and headmen gathered to meet him. At last, on July 1st, they were all assembled; not only the Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Ottawas, Pottawatamies and others who had openly taken the hatchet against the Americans, but also representatives of the Six Nations, and tribes of savages from lands so remote that they carried no guns, but warred with bows, spears, and tomahawks, and were clad in buffalo-robes instead of blankets.