It seems fairly presumable, from our knowledge of the history and character of the North American Indians, that had they been left to the promptings of their own judgments, and been influenced only by the deliberations of their own councils, they would, after a brief, but perhaps most bloody, resistance to the encroachments of the whites, have bowed to what would have struck their untutored minds as an inevitable destiny, and year after year flowed silently, as the European wave pressed upon them, further and further into the vast wildernesses of the mighty West.  But left to their own judgments, or their own deliberations, they never have been.  Early armed by renegade white men with European weapons, and taught the improvement of their own rude instruments of warfare, and instigated not only to oppose the strides of their enemies after territory, but to commit depredations upon their settlements, and to attempt to chastise them at their very thresholds, they drew down upon themselves the wrath of a people which is not slow to anger, nor easily appeased; and as far back as the Revolution, if not as the colonizing of Massachusetts, their breasts were filled with a hatred of the whites, deadly and unslumbering.  Through all our subsequent transactions with them, this feeling has been increasing in magnitude and intensity:  and recent events have carried it to a pitch which will render it enduring forever, perhaps not in its activity, but certainly in its bitterness.  Whether more amicable relations with the whites, during the first settlements made upon this continent by the Europeans, would have changed materially the ultimate destiny of the aboriginal tribes, is a question about which diversities of opinion may well be entertained; but it is not to be considered here.

The fierce, and bloody, and continuous opposition which the Indians have made from the first to the encroachments of the Anglo-Americans, is matter of history; and close scrutiny will show, that the great instigators of that opposition have always, or nearly so, been renegade white men.  Scattered through the tribes east of the Alleghanies, before and during the American Revolution, there were many such miscreants.  Among the Western tribes, during the early settlement of Kentucky and Ohio, and at the period of the last war with Great Britain, there were a number, some of them men of talent and great activity.  One of the boldest and most notorious of these latter, was one whom we have had frequent occasion to mention, SIMON GIRTY—­for many years the scourge of the infant settlements in the West, the terror of women, and the bugaboo of children.  This man was an adopted member of the great Wyandot nation, among whom he ranked high as an expert hunter, a brave warrior, and a powerful orator.  His influence extended through all the tribes of the West, and was generally exerted to incite the Indians to expeditions against the “Stations” of Kentucky, and to acts of cruelty to their white prisoners.  The bloodiest counsel was usually his; his was the voice which was raised loudest against his countrymen, who were preparing the way for the introduction of civilization and Christianity into this glorious region; and in all great attacks upon the frontier settlements he was one of the prime movers, and among the prominent leaders.