beasts, and ravaged with a cruelty ten times greater. They
burned down the lonely log-huts, ambushed travellers, shot the men as
they hunted or tilled the soil, ripped open the women with child, and
burned many of their captives at the stake. Their noiseless approach
enabled them to fall on the settlers before their presence was
suspected; and they disappeared as suddenly as they had come, leaving no
trail that could be followed. The charred huts and scalped and mangled
bodies of their victims were left as ghastly reminders of their visit,
the sight stirring the backwoodsmen to a frenzy of rage all the more
terrible in the end, because it was impotent for the time being.
Generally they made their escape successfully; occasionally they were
beaten off or overtaken and killed or scattered.

When they met armed woodsmen the fight was always desperate. In May, a
party of hunters and surveyors, being suddenly attacked in the forest,
beat off their assailants and took eight scalps, though with a loss of
nine of their own number.[55] Moreover, the settlers began to band
together to make retaliatory inroads; and while Lord Dunmore was busily
preparing to strike a really effective blow, he directed the
frontiersmen of the northwest to undertake a foray, so as to keep the
Indians employed. Accordingly, they gathered together, four hundred
strong,[56] crossed the Ohio, in the end of July, and marched against a
Shawnee town on the Muskingum. They had a brisk skirmish with the
Shawnees, drove them back, and took five scalps, losing two men killed
and five wounded. Then the Shawnees tried to ambush them, but their
ambush was discovered, and they promptly fled, after a slight skirmish,
in which no one was killed but one Indian, whom Cresap, a very active
and vigorous man, ran down and slew with his tomahawk.[57] The Shawnee
village was burned, seventy acres of standing corn were cut down, and
the settlers returned in triumph. On the march back they passed through
the towns of the peaceful Moravian Delawares, to whom they did no harm.

1. "American Archives," 4th series, Vol. I., p. 454. Report of Penn.
Commissioners, June 27, 1774.

2. Maryland was also involved, along her western frontier, in border
difficulties with her neighbors; the first we hear of the Cresap family
is their having engaged in a real skirmish with the Pennsylvanian
authorities. See also "Am. Arch.," IV., Vol. I., 547.

3. "Am. Arch.," IV., Vol. I., 394, 449, 4