enemies of the Americans were as forward in professions of friendship as
the peaceful Indians, were just as apt to be found at the treaties, or
lounging about the settlements; and this widespread treachery and deceit
made the task of the army officers puzzling to a degree. As for the
frontiersmen, who had no means whatever of telling a hostile from a
friendly tribe, they followed their usual custom and lumped all the
Indians, good and bad, together; for which they could hardly be blamed.
Even St. Clair, who had small sympathy with the backwoodsmen,
acknowledged [Footnote: American State Papers, IV., 58.] that they could
not and ought not to submit patiently to the cruelties and depredations
of the savages; "they are in the habit of retaliation, perhaps without
attending precisely to the nations from which the injuries are
received," said he. A long course of such aggressions and retaliations
resulted, by the year 1791, in all the Northwestern Indians going on the
war-path. The hostile tribes had murdered and plundered the
frontiersmen; the vengeance of the latter, as often as not, had fallen
on friendly tribes; and these justly angered friendly tribes usually
signalized their taking the red hatchet by some act of treacherous
hostility directed against the settlers who had not molested them.

Treachery of the Friendly Delawares.

In the late winter of 1791 the hitherto friendly Delawares who hunted or
traded along the western frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia proper
took this manner of showing that they had joined the open foes of the
Americans. A big band of warriors spread up and down the Alleghany for
about forty miles, and on the 9th of February attacked all the outlying
settlements. The Indians who delivered this attack had long been on
intimate terms with the Alleghany settlers, who were accustomed to see
them in and about their houses; and as the savages acted with seeming