What sort of resistance the Pennsylvanian borderers would have made under political circumstances less adverse may be inferred from an exploit of Colonel John Armstrong, a settler of Cumberland.  After the loss of Fort Granville the Governor of the province sent him with three hundred men to attack the Delaware town of Kittanning, a populous nest of savages on the Alleghany, between the two French posts of Duquesne and Venango.  Here most of the war-parties were fitted out, and the place was full of stores and munitions furnished by the French.  Here, too, lived the redoubted chief called Captain Jacobs, the terror of the English border.  Armstrong set out from Fort Shirley, the farthest outpost, on the last of August, and, a week after, was within six miles of the Indian town.  By rapid marching and rare good luck, his party had escaped discovery.  It was ten o’clock at night, with a bright moon.  The guides were perplexed, and knew neither the exact position of the place nor the paths that led to it.  The adventurers threaded the forest in single file, over hills and through hollows, bewildered and anxious, stopping to watch and listen.  At length they heard in the distance the beating of an Indian drum and the whooping of warriors in the war-dance.  Guided by the sounds, they cautiously moved forward, till those in the front, scrambling down a rocky hill, found themselves on the banks of the Alleghany, about a hundred rods below Kittanning.  The moon was near setting; but they could dimly see the town beyond a great intervening field of corn.  “At that moment,” says Armstrong, “an Indian whistled in a very singular manner, about thirty perches from our front, in the foot of the cornfield.”  He thought they were discovered; but one Baker, a soldier well versed in Indian ways, told him that it was only some village gallant calling to a young squaw.  The party then crouched in the bushes, and kept silent.  The moon sank behind the woods, and fires soon glimmered through the field, kindled to drive off mosquitoes by some of the Indians who, as the night was warm, had come out to sleep in the open air.  The eastern sky began to redden with the approach of day.  Many of the party, spent with a rough march of thirty miles, had fallen asleep.  They were now cautiously roused; and Armstrong ordered nearly half of them to make their way along the ridge of a bushy hill that overlooked the town, till they came opposite to it, in order to place it between two fires.  Twenty minutes were allowed them for the movement; but they lost their way in the dusk, and reached their station too late.  When the time had expired, Armstrong gave the signal to those left with him, who dashed into the cornfield, shooting down the astonished savages or driving them into the village, where they turned and made desperate fight.