Ferocious Individual Warfare.

The savages continued to annoy the border throughout the year 1778.  The extent of their ravages can be seen from the fact that, during the summer months those around Detroit alone brought in to Hamilton eighty-one scalps and thirty-four prisoners, [Footnote:  Haldimand MSS.  Letter of Hamilton, September 16, 1778.  Hamilton was continually sending out small war parties; thus he mentions that on August 25th a party of fifteen Miamis went out; on September 5th, thirty-one Miamis; on September 9th, one Frenchman, five Chippewas, and fifteen Miamis, etc.] seventeen of whom they surrendered to the British, keeping the others either to make them slaves or else to put them to death with torture.  During the fall they confined themselves mainly to watching the Ohio and the Wilderness road, and harassing the immigrants who passed along them. [Footnote:  McAfee MSS.]

Boon, as usual, roamed restlessly over the country, spying out and harrying the Indian war parties, and often making it his business to meet the incoming bands of settlers, and to protect and guide them on the way to their intended homes. [Footnote:  Marshall, 55.] When not on other duty he hunted steadily, for game was still plentiful in Kentucky, though fast diminishing owing to the wanton slaughter made by some of the more reckless hunters. [Footnote:  McAfee MSS.] He met with many adventures, still handed down by tradition, in the chase of panther, wolf, and bear, of buffalo, elk, and deer.  The latter he killed only when their hides and meat were needed, while he followed unceasingly the dangerous beasts of prey, as being enemies of the settlers.

Throughout these years the obscure strife, made up of the individual contests of frontiersman and Indian, went on almost without a break.  The sieges, surprises, and skirmishes in which large bands took part were chronicled; but there is little reference in the books to the countless conflicts wherein only one or two men on a side were engaged.  The west could never have been conquered, in the teeth of so formidable and ruthless a foe, had it not been for the personal prowess of the pioneers themselves.  Their natural courage and hardihood, and their long training in forest warfare, [Footnote:  The last point is important.  No Europeans could have held their own for a fortnight in Kentucky; nor is it likely that the western men twenty years before, at the time of Braddock’s war, could have successfully colonized such a far-off country.] made them able to hold their own and to advance step by step, where a peaceable population would have been instantly butchered or driven off.  No regular army could have done what they did.  Only trained woodsmen could have led the white advance into the vast forest-clad regions, out of which so many fair States have been hewn.  The ordinary regular soldier was almost as helpless before the Indians in the woods as he would have been if blindfolded and opposed to an antagonist whose eyes were left uncovered.