Nor must we permit our sympathy for the foul wrongs of the two great Indian heroes of the contest to blind us to the fact that the struggle was precipitated, in the first place, by the outrages of the red men, not the whites; and that the war was not only inevitable, but was also in its essence just and righteous on the part of the borderers.  Even the unpardonable and hideous atrocity of the murder of Logan’s family, was surpassed in horror by many of the massacres committed by the Indians about the same time.  The annals of the border are dark and terrible.

Among the characters who played the leaders’ parts in this short and tragic drama of the backwoods few came to much afterwards.  Cresap died a brave Revolutionary soldier.  Of Greathouse we know nothing; we can only hope that eventually the Indians scalped him.  Conolly became a virulent tory, who yet lacked the power to do the evil that he wished.  Lewis served creditably in the Revolution; while at its outbreak Lord Dunmore was driven from Virginia and disappears from our ken.  Proud, gloomy Logan never recovered from the blow that had been dealt him; he drank deeper and deeper, and became more and more an implacable, moody, and bloodthirsty savage, yet with noble qualities that came to the surface now and then.  Again and again he wrought havoc among the frontier settlers; yet we several times hear of his saving the lives of prisoners.  Once he saved Simon Kenton from torture and death, when Girty, moved by a rare spark of compassion for his former comrade, had already tried to do so and failed.  At last he perished in a drunken brawl by the hand of another Indian.

Cornstalk died a grand death, but by an act of cowardly treachery on the part of his American foes; it is one of the darkest stains on the checkered pages of frontier history.  Early in 1777 he came into the garrison at Point Pleasant to explain that, while he was anxious to keep at peace, his tribe were bent on going to war; and he frankly added that of course if they did so he should have to join them.  He and three other Indians, among them his son and the chief Redhawk, who had also been at the Kanawha battle, were detained as hostages.  While they were thus confined in the fort a member of a company of rangers was killed by the Indians near by; whereupon his comrades, headed by their captain,[57] rushed in furious anger into the fort to slay the hostages.  Cornstalk heard them rushing in, and knew that his hour had come; with unmoved countenance he exhorted his son not to fear, for it was the will of the Great Spirit that they should die there together; then, as the murderers burst into the room, he quietly rose up to meet them, and fell dead pierced by seven or eight bullets.  His son and his comrades were likewise butchered, and we have no record of any more infamous deed.