less,
of the barbarous deeds done by the Indians. Its agents furnished them
with arms and ammunition, and its ministers upheld them in the same
atrocities against the American rebels as the French in their time had
urged and tempted them to commit against the settlers when they were
English subjects.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Indians were as slow to lay
down their arms as they had been after the French War. In each case they
fought the victors, as far as they could get at them in the persons
of the hapless backwoodsmen and their wives and children. These
backwoodsmen did not change greatly, in their way of life, during that
long Indian war of forty years. They were of the hardy English, Welsh,
and Scotch-Irish stock which a generation or two in the wilderness had
toughened and strengthened. They had not yet ciphered it out that one
red hunter and trapper must waste the fifty thousand acres which
would support the families of a hundred white farmers in comfort and
prosperity; but they knew that to the westward there was a region, vast
and rich beyond anything words could say, and they longed to possess
it, with a hunger that was sometimes a pitiless greed, and always a
resistless desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region
that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it
fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the
borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters
and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages
and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own
wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and would not use
it, and they were right, for the land truly belongs to him who will use
it. The savages felt that the pioneers were coming to take their own
from them, for in their way they were using the land; and they were
right, too. All that is left for us to ask at this late day is which
could use the land best and most; and there can hardly be any doubt of
the answer.

[Illustration: Pioneers 049L]

To understand the situation clearly, the reader must keep in mind
certain dates. Celoron de Bienville visited the Miamis in 1749, and
the French kept the Ohio Indians on the warpath against the English
settlements to the eastward until 1763, when they gave up the West to
Great Britain. Then, until 1775, the savages alone fought the settlers
as the subjects of the E