Utter Untrustworthiness of the Indians.

The warriors who had engaged in this raid on their former friends, the settlers along the Alleghany. retreated two or three days’ journey into the wilderness to an appointed place, where they found their families.  One of the Girtys was with the Indians.  No sooner had the last of the warriors come in, with their scalps and prisoners, including the boy Brickell, than ten of their number deliberately started back to Pittsburgh, to pass themselves as friendly Indians, and trade.  In a fortnight they returned laden with goods of various kinds, including whiskey.  Some of the inhabitants, sore from disaster, suspected that these Indians were only masquerading as friendly, and prepared to attack them; but one of the citizens warned them of their danger and they escaped.  Their effrontery was as remarkable as their treachery and duplicity.  They had suddenly attacked and massacred settlers by whom they had never been harmed, and with whom they preserved an appearance of entire friendship up to the very moment of the assault.  Then, their hands red with the blood of their murdered friends, they came boldly into Pittsburgh, among the near neighbors of these same murdered men, and stayed there several days to trade, pretending to be peaceful allies of the whites.  With savages so treacherous and so ferocious it was a mere impossibility for the borderers to distinguish the hostile from the friendly, as they hit out blindly to revenge the blows that fell upon them from unknown hands.  Brutal though the frontiersmen often were, they never employed the systematic and deliberate bad faith which was a favorite weapon with even the best of the red tribes.

    The Federal Authorities Misjudge the Settlers.

The people who were out of reach of the Indian tomahawk, and especially the Federal officers, were often unduly severe in judging the borderers for their deeds of retaliation, Brickell’s narrative shows that the parties of seemingly friendly Indians who came in to trade were sometimes—­and indeed in this year 1791 it was probable they were generally—­composed of Indians who were engaged in active hostilities against the settlers, and who were always watching for a chance to murder and plunder.  On March 9th, a month after the Delawares had begun their attacks, the grim backwoods captain Brady, with some of his Virginian rangers, fell on a party of them who had come to a block-house to trade, and killed four.  The Indians asserted that they were friendly, and both the Federal Secretary of War and the Governor of Pennsylvania denounced the deed, and threatened the offenders; but the frontiersmen stood by them. [Footnote:  State Department MSS., Washington Papers, Ex.  C., p. 11, etc.  Presly Neville to Richard Butler, March 19, 1791; Isaac Craig to Secretary of War, March 16, 1791; Secretary of War to President, March 31, 1791.] Soon afterwards a delegation of chiefs from the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois arrived