The Winning of the West, Volume 2 / From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783

Produced by Mark Hamann, Terry Gilliland and PG Distributed Proofreaders
IV.—CONTINUANCE OF THE STRUGGLE IN KENTUCKY AND THE NORTHWEST, 1779-1781.
XII.—THE CUMBERLAND SETTLEMENTS TO THE CLOSE OF THE REVOLUTION, 1781-1783.
APPENDIX A—To CHAPTER I. APPENDIX B—To CHAPTER II. APPENDIX C—To CHAPTER III. APPENDIX D—To CHAPTER IV. APPENDIX E—To CHAPTER VII. APPENDIX F—To CHAPTER VII. APPENDIX G—To CHAPTER X. APPENDIX H—To CHAPTER XII. APPENDIX I—To CHAPTER XIII. APPENDIX J—To CHAPTER XIII.
The Tribes Hold Councils at Detroit.
Lt-Gov. Henry Hamilton. Scalp Buying.
The British Begin a War of Extermination.
All the Northwestern Tribes go to War.
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 Attack on Wheeling.
In Virginia and Pennsylvania the Indian outrages meant only the harassing of the borderers; in Kentucky they threatened the complete destruction of the vanguard of the white advance and, therefore the stoppage of all settlement west of the Alleghanies until after the Revolutionary war, when very possibly the soil might not have been ours to settle. Fortunately Hamilton did not yet realize the importance of the Kentucky settlements, nor the necessity of crushing them, and during 1777 the war bands organized at Detroit were sent against the country round Pittsburg; while the feeble forts in the far western wilderness were only troubled by smaller war parties raised among the tribes on their own account. A strong expedition, led by Hamilton in person, would doubtless at this time have crushed them.