“Poor women who had traveled one hundred miles from the back settlements of Pennsylvania, and New England appeared here with anxious looks and aching hearts, not knowing whether their children were alive or dead, or how to identify their children if they should meet them....”

“On a gentle slope near the Fort stood a row of temporary huts built by retainers to the troops; the green before these buildings was the scene of these pathetic recognitions which I did not fail to attend.  The joy of the happy mothers was overpowering and found vent in tears; but not the tears of those who after long travel found not what they sought.  It was affecting to see the deep silent sorrow of the Indian women and of the children, who knew no other mother, and clung fondly to their bosems from whence they were not torn without bitter shrieks.  I shall never forget the grotesque figures and wild looks of these young savages; nor the trembling haste with which their mothers arrayed them in the new clothes they had brought for them, as hoping with the Indian dress they would throw off their habits and attachments...."[91]

Such distress caused by Indian raids did not, of course, cease with the seventeenth century.  During the entire period of the next century the settlers on the western frontier lived under constant dread of such calamities.  It has been one of the chief elements in American history—­this ceaseless expectation of warfare with primitive savages.  In the settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, in the establishment of the great states of the Plains, in the founding of civilization on the Pacific slope, even down to the twentieth century, the price of progress has been paid in this form of savage torture of women and children.  Even in the long settled communities of the eighteenth century such dangers did not entirely disappear.  As late as 1782, when an attempt was made by Burgoyne to capture General Schuyler, the ancient contest between mother and Indian warrior once more occurred.  “Their guns were stacked in the hall, the guards being outside and the relief asleep.  Lest the small Philip (grandson of General Schuyler) be tempted to play with the guns, his mother had them removed.  The guards rushed for their guns, but they were gone.  The family fled up stairs, but Margaret, remembering the baby in the cradle below, ran back, seized the baby, and when she was half way up the flight, an Indian flung his tomahawk at her head, which, missing her, buried itself in the wood, and left its historic mark to the present time."[92]

VIII.  Parental Training