But at length Logan came no more. The Great Spirit called him to a happier hunting-ground; and all that is mortal of him—unless his remains have been ruthlessly torn from the bosom of mother earth—lies beneath the sod, near the mouth of Chickalacamoose Creek.
It is to be regretted that more of his history has not been preserved, for, according to all accounts of him, he possessed many noble traits of character. Unlike Logan the Mingo chief, Captain Logan the Cayuga chief had no biographer like Thomas Jefferson to embellish the pages of history with his eloquence. Well may we say, "The evil that men do lives after them, while the good is oft interred with their bones."
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CONCLUSION.
Pushing the light canoe on the lagoons in search of fish and lassoing the wild horse on the pampas of the South, chasing the buffalo on the boundless prairies and hunting the antlered stag in the dense forests of the West, is now the Indian's occupation; and there he may be found, ever shunning the haunts of civilization.
The Delaware Indians have been exterminated, and their very name (Lenni Lenape) blotted from existence, save where it appears upon the pages of history.
Of the Shawnees, once the powerful warlike tribe that was known and feared from the seaboard to the lakes, but a few degenerate families reside in the Far West.
Of the Great Confederation of the Iroquois but a remnant exists to remind us of its former greatness, its councils, its wars, and its "talks." They reside in Western New York, in a semi-civilized but degraded state, and are but sorry representatives of the once proud and stately warriors the crack of whose sharp and unerring rifles made the woods ring, and whose canoes danced upon the waves of the blue Juniata more than a hundred years ago.
But they are all gone, and the bones of their ancestors are the only relics which they have left behind them. The hand of the same inscrutable Providence that suffered them to march as mighty conquerors from the West to the East, crushing out the existence of a weaker people in their triumphant march, stayed them, blighted them in the noonday of their glory, and, like the receding waves of the sea, drove them back in the direction whence they came, where they scattered, and the ties which bound them together as tribes dissolved even as would ice beneath the rays of a tropical sun.
The reader of the foregoing pages may sometimes think it strange that the savages committed so many depredations with impunity, killed, scalped, or carried so many into captivity, while but comparatively few of the marauders were destroyed. The cause of this can be easily explained. The savages always made covert attacks. As will be remembered, very few massacres occurred in the valley by open attack,—nearly all their depredations being committed while in ambuscade or when they had a foe completely in their power. Their incursions were always conducted with great caution, and no sooner did they strike a decisive blow than they disappeared. To guard against their ferocity was impossible; to follow them was equally futile. The settlers were too few in number to leave one force at home to guard against them and to send another in pursuit of them; for, during the Revolution, the belief was prevalent that a large force was ever ready to descend into the valley, and that the incursions of a few were only stratagems to lure the settlers to destruction by following them to where a large number were concealed. It was frequently proposed to send a strong force to waylay the gaps of the mountain; but the settlers refused to trust the protection of their families to the raw militia sent by government to defend the frontier.