by the farmers at Lexington; and
Hamilton had been obliged to thread his way through General Montgomery's
lines about Montreal in the guise of a Canadian. Arrived at his new seat
of authority, he found a pleasant, freshly fortified town whose white
population had grown to fifteen hundred, including a considerable
number of English-speaking settlers. The country round was overrun with
traders, who cheated and cajoled the Indians without conscience; the
natives, in turn, were a nondescript lot, showing in pitiful manner the
bad effects of their contact with the whites.

As related by a contemporary chronicler--a Pennsylvanian who lived for
years among the western tribes--an Indian hunting party on arriving at
Detroit would trade perhaps a third of the peltries which they brought
in for fine clothes, ammunition, paint, tobacco, and like articles.
Then a keg of brandy would be purchased, and a council would be held to
decide who was to get drunk and who to keep sober. All arms and clubs
were taken away and hidden, and the orgy would begin. It was the task
of those who kept sober to prevent the drunken ones from killing one
another, a task always hazardous and frequently unsuccessful, sometimes
as many as five being killed in a night. When the keg was empty, brandy
was brought by the kettleful and ladled out with large wooden spoons;
and this was kept up until the last skin had been disposed of. Then,
dejected, wounded, lamed, with their fine new shirts torn, their
blankets burned, and with nothing but their ammunition and tobacco
saved, they would start off down the river to hunt in the Ohio country
and begin again the same round of alternating toil and debauchery. In
the history of the country there is hardly a more depressing chapter
than that which records the easy descent of the red man, once his taste
for "fire water" was developed, to bestiality and impotence.

The coming on of the Revolution produced no immediate effects in the
West. The meaning of the occurrences round Boston was but slowly grasped
by the frontier folk. There was little indeed that the Westerners could
do to help the cause of the eastern patriots, and most of them, if left
alone, would have been only distant spectators of the conflict. But
orders given to the British agents and commanders called for the
ravaging of the trans-Alleghany country; and as a consequence the West
became an important theater of hostilities.

The British agents had no troo