they got a chance, and the traders
almost invariably cheated the tribesmen. But as a whole the traders were
Indian rather than white in their sympathies, and the whites rarely made
forays against their foes avowedly for horses and plunder, while the
Indians on their side were continually indulging in such inroads. Every
year parties of young red warriors crossed the Ohio to plunder the
outlying farms, burn down the buildings, scalp the inmates, and drive
off the horses.[12] Year by year the exasperation of the borderers grew
greater and the tale of the wrongs they had to avenge longer.[13]
Occasionally they took a brutal and ill-judged vengeance, which usually
fell on innocent Indians,[14] and raised up new foes for the whites. The
savages grew continually more hostile, and in the fall of 1773 their
attacks became so frequent that it was evident a general outbreak was at
hand; eleven people were murdered in the county of Fincastle alone.[15]
The Shawnees were the leaders in all these outrages; but the outlaw
bands, such as the Mingos and Cherokees, were as bad, and parties of
Wyandots and Delawares, as well as of the various Miami and Wabash
tribes, joined them.

Thus the spring of 1774 opened with every thing ripe for an explosion.
The Virginian borderers were fearfully exasperated, and ready to take
vengeance upon any Indians, whether peaceful or hostile; while the
Shawnees and Mingos, on their side, were arrogant and overbearing, and
yet alarmed at the continual advance of the whites. The headstrong
rashness of Conolly, who was acting as Lord Dunmore's lieutenant on the
border, and who was equally willing to plunge into a war with
Pennsylvania or the Shawnees, served as a firebrand to ignite this mass
of tinder. The borderers were anxious for a war; and Lord Dunmore was
not inclined to baulk them. He was ambitious of glory, and probably
thought that in the midst of the growing difficulties between the mother
country and the colonies, it would be good policy to distract the
Virginians' minds by an Indian war, which, if he conducted it to a
successful conclusion, might strengthen his own position.[16]

There were on the border at the moment three or four men whose names are
so intimately bound up with the history of this war, that they deserve a
brief mention. One was Michael Cresap, a Maryland frontiersman, who had
come to the banks of the Ohio with the purpose of making a home for his
family.[17] He was of the regu