The gates were closed,
and the whites all ready; so the Indians abandoned their effort and drew
off. They had taken five scalps and a number of horses; but they had
failed in their main object, and the whites had taken two scalps,
besides killing and wounding others of the red men, who were carried off
by their comrades.

After the failure of this attempt the Indians did not, for some years,
make any formidable attack on any of the larger stations. Though the
most dangerous of all foes on their own ground, their extreme caution
and dislike of suffering punishment prevented them from ever making
really determined efforts to carry a fort openly by storm; moreover,
these stockades were really very defensible against men unprovided with
artillery, and there is no reason for supposing that any troops could
have carried them by fair charging, without suffering altogether
disproportionate loss. The red tribes acted in relation to the
Cumberland settlements exactly as they had previously done towards those
on the Kentucky and Watauga. They harassed the settlers from the outset;
but they did not wake up to the necessity for a formidable and combined
campaign against them until it was too late for such a campaign to
succeed. If, at the first, any one of these communities had been forced
to withstand the shock of such Indian armies as were afterwards brought
against it, it would, of necessity, have been abandoned.

Indian Hostilities.

Throughout '81 and '82 the Cumberland settlers were worried beyond
description by a succession of small war parties. In the first of these
years they raised no corn; in the second they made a few crops on fields
they had cleared in 1780. No man's life was safe for an hour, whether he
hunted, looked up strayed stock, went to the spring for water, or tilled
the fields. If two men were together, one always watched while the other
worked, ate, or drank; and they sat down back to back, or, if there were
several, in a ring, facing outwards, like a covey of quail. The Indians
were especially fond of stealing the horses; the whites pursued them in
bands, and occasionally pitched battles were fought, with loss on both
sides, and apparently as often resulting in the favor of one party as of
the other. The most expert Indian fighters naturally became the leaders,
being made colonels and captains of the local militia. The position and
influence of the officers depended largely on their individual prowess