e Western plains were in our
time. It was a tie of real love that bound them and their savage friends
together, and it was sometimes stronger than the tie of blood. But this
made their fate all the crueler to their kindred; for whether they lived
or whether they died, they were lost to the fathers and mothers, and
brothers and sisters whom they had been torn from; and it was little
consolation to these that they had found human mercy and tenderness in
the breasts of savages who in all else were like ravening beasts. It
was rather an agony added to what they had already suffered to know that
somewhere in the trackless forests to the westward there was growing up
a child who must forget them. The time came when something must be done
to end all this and to put a stop to the Indian attacks on the frontiers
of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The jealous colonies united with the
jealous mother country, and a little army of British regulars and
American recruits was sent into Ohio under the lead of Colonel Henry
Bouquet to force the savages to give up their captives.

This officer, who commanded the king's troops at Philadelphia, was a
young Swiss who had fought in the great wars of Europe, in the service
of the king of Piedmont and of the Dutch republic, before he was given a
commission by the king of Great Britain. He had distinguished himself
by his bravery, his skill, and his good sense. He seems to have been the
first European commander to disuse the rules of European warfare, and
to take a lesson from our pioneers in fighting the Indians, and the year
before he set out for the Ohio country, he had beaten the tribes in a
battle that taught them to respect him. They found that they had no such
wrong-headed leader as Braddock to deal with; and that they could not
hope to ambush Bouquet's troops, and shoot them down like cattle in a
pen; and the news of his coming spread awe among them.

He gathered his forces together at Fort Pitt, after many delays. At one
time a full third of his colonial recruits deserted him, but he waited
till he had made up their number again, and then he started at the head
of fifteen hundred men, on the 3d of October, 1764. A body of Virginians
went first in three scouting parties, one on the right and one on the
left, to beat up the woods for lurking enemies, and one in the middle
with a guide, to lead the way. Then came the pioneers with their axes,
and two companies of light infantry followed, to cle