to have been burned, and where he died peaceably in 1836, when he
was eighty-one years old. He is described as a tall, handsome man, of
an erect figure and carriage, a fair complexion, and a most attractive
countenance. "He had," his biographer tells us, "a soft, tremulous
voice, very pleasing to the hearer, and laughing gray eyes that appeared
to fascinate the beholder," except in his rare moments of anger, when
their fiery glance would curdle the blood of those who had roused his
wrath. He was above all the heroes of Ohio history, both in his virtues
and his vices, the type of the Indian fighter. He was ready to kill or
to take the chances of being killed, but he had no more hate apparently
for the wild men than for the wild beasts he hunted.

VII. THE RENEGADES.

Simon Girty, who tried so hard to save Kenton's life at Wapatimika, was
the most notorious of those white renegades who abounded in the Ohio
country during the Indian wars. The life of the border was often such
as to make men desperate and cruel, and the life of the wilderness had
a fascination which their fierce natures could hardly resist. Kenton
himself, as we have seen, might perhaps have willingly remained with the
Indians if they had wished him to be one of them, though he was at heart
too kindly and loyal ever to have become the enemy of his own people,
and if he had been adopted into an Indian family he would probably have
been such an Indian as Smith was. But in the sort of backwoodsman he
had been there was such stuff as renegades were made of. Like him these
desperadoes had mostly fled from the settlements after some violent
deed, and could not have gone back to their homes there if they would.
Yet they were not much worse than the traders who came and went among
the Indians in times of peace, and supplied them with the weapons and
the ammunition they might use at any moment against the settlers.

Indeed, wherever the two races touched they seemed to get all of each
other's vices, and very few of each other's virtues; and it is doubtful
if the law breakers who escaped from the borders to the woods were more
ferocious than many whom they left behind. Neither side showed mercy;
their warfare was to the death; the white men tomahawked and scalped
the wounded as the red men did, and if the settlers were not always
so pitiless to their prisoners or to the wives and children of their
warriors, they were guilty of many acts of murderous treachery