ion of the war on
the part of the Indians, after it had been terminated with their
allies by the treaty of 1763. Yet that event was, no doubt, justly
attributable to the erection of forts, and the location of land, in
the district of country claimed by the natives, in the province of
Pennsylvania. And in like manner, the origin of the war of 1774 may
fairly be charged to the encroachments which were then being made on
the Indian territory. To be convinced of this, it is necessary to
advert to the promptitude of resistance on the part of the Natives, by
which those encroachments were invariably met; and to recur to events
happening in other sections of the country.--Events, perhaps no
otherwise connected with the history of North Western Virginia, than
as they are believed to have been the proximate causes of an
hostility, eventuating in the effusion of much of its blood; and
pregnant with other circumstances, having an important bearing on its
prosperity and advancement.

In the whole history of America, from the time when it first [108]
became apparent that the occupancy of the country was the object of
the whites, up to the present period, is there perhaps to be found a
solitary instance, in which an attempt, made by the English to effect
a settlement in a wilderness claimed by the Natives, was not succeeded
by immediate acts of hostility on the part of the latter. Every
advance of the kind was regarded by them, as tending to effect their
expulsion from a country, which they had long considered as their own,
and as leading, most probably, to their entire extinction as a people.
This excited in them feelings of the most dire resentment; stimulating
to deeds of cruelty and murder, at once to repel the encroachment and
to punish its authors. Experience of the utter futility of those means
to accomplish these purposes, has never availed to repress their use,
or to produce an acquiesence in the wrong. Even attempts to extend
jurisdiction over a country, the right of soil in which was never
denied them, have ever given rise to the most lively apprehensions of
their fatal consequences, and prompted to the employment of means to
thwart that aim. An Indian sees no difference between the right of
empire and the right of domain; and just as little can he discriminate
between the right of property, acquired by the actual cultivation of
the earth, and that which arises from its appropriation to other
uses.

Among themselves the