and
some put on necklaces of bears' claws, and head-dresses made of panther
skin, or of the shaggy and horned frontlet of the buffalo. [Footnote:
For instances of an Indian wearing this buffalo cap, with the horns on,
see Kercheval and De Haas.]

Before the snow was off the ground the war parties crossed the Ohio and
fell on the frontiers from the Monongahela and Kanawha to the Kentucky.
[Footnote: State Department MSS. for 1777, _passim_. So successful were
the Indian chiefs in hoodwinking the officers at Fort Pitt that some of
the latter continued to believe that only three or four hundred Indians
had gone on the war path.]

On the Pennsylvanian and Virginian frontiers the panic was tremendous.
The people fled into the already existing forts, or hastily built
others; where there were but two or three families in a place, they
merely gathered into block-houses--stout log-cabins two stories high,
with loop-holed walls, and the upper story projecting a little over the
lower. The savages, well armed with weapons supplied them from the
British arsenals on the Great Lakes, spread over the country; and there
ensued all the horrors incident to a war waged as relentlessly against
the most helpless non-combatants as against the armed soldiers in the
field. Block-houses were surprised and burnt; bodies of militia were
ambushed and destroyed. The settlers were shot down as they sat by their
hearth-stones in the evening, or ploughed the ground during the day; the
lurking Indians crept up and killed them while they still-hunted the
deer, or while they lay in wait for the elk beside the well-beaten game
trails.

The captured women and little ones were driven off to the far interior.
The weak among them, the young children, and the women heavy with child,
were tomahawked and scalped as soon as their steps faltered. The
able-bodied, who could stand the terrible fatigue, and reached their
journey's end, suffered various fates. Some were burned at the stake,
others were sold to the French or British traders, and long afterwards
made their escape, or were ransomed by their relatives. Still others
were kept in the Indian camps, the women becoming the slaves or wives of
the warriors, [Footnote: Occasionally we come across records of the
women afterwards making their escape; very rarely they took their
half-breed babies with them. De Haas mentions one such case where the
husband, though he received his wife well, always hated the
copp