peace on any terms that were possible. The Secretary of War, who knew
nothing of Indians by actual contact, wrote that it would be indeed
pleasing "to a philosophic mind to reflect that, instead of
exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population ... we
had imparted our knowledge of cultivation and the arts to the
aboriginals of the country," thus preserving and civilizing them
[Footnote: American State Papers, Vol. IV., pp. 53, 57, 60, 77, 79, 81,
etc.]; and the public men who represented districts remote from the
frontier shared these views of large, though vague, beneficence. But
neither the white frontiersmen nor their red antagonists possessed
"philosophic minds." They represented two stages of progress, ages
apart; and it would have needed many centuries to bring the lower to the
level of the higher. Both sides recognized the fact that their interests
were incompatible; and that the question of their clashing rights had to
be settled by the strong hand.

The Trouble Most Serious in the North.

In the Northwest matters culminated sooner than in the Southwest. The
Georgians, and the settlers along the Tennessee and Cumberland, were
harassed rather than seriously menaced by the Creek war parties; but in
the north the more dangerous Indians of the Miami, the Wabash, and the
Lakes gathered in bodies so large as fairly to deserve the name of
armies. Moreover, the pressure of the white advance was far heavier in
the north. The pioneers who settled in the Ohio basin were many times as
numerous as those who settled on the lands west of the Oconee and north
of the Cumberland, and were fed from States much more populous. The
advance was stronger, the resistance more desperate; naturally the open
break occurred where the strain was most intense.