found upon the western frontiers, a band of unprincipled men who have set at defiance the laws of the United States, debauched the Indians with ardent spirits, cheated them of their property, and then committed upon them aggressions marked with all the cruelty and wanton bloodshed which have distinguished the career of the savage.  The history of these aggressions would fill a volume.  It is only necessary to recall to the mind of the reader, the horrible murder of the Conestoga Indians, in December 1763, by some Pennsylvanians; the dark tragedy enacted on the banks of he Muskingum, at a later period, when the Moravian Indians, at the three villages of Schoenbrun, Salem, and Gnadenhuetten, were first disarmed and then deliberately tomahawked by Williamson and his associates; the unprovoked murder of the family of Logan; the assassination of Bald Eagle, of the gallant and high-souled Cornstalk, and his son Elinipsico:  we need but recall these, from the long catalogue of similar cases, to satisfy every candid mind, that rapine, cruelty and a thirst for human blood are not peculiarly the attributes of the American Indian.

But there are still other causes which have aroused and kept in activity, the warlike passions of the Indians.  They have been successively subjected to English, Dutch, French and Spanish influence.  The agents of these different powers, as well as the emigrants from them, either from interest or a spirit of mischievous hostility, have repeatedly prompted the Indians to arm themselves against the United States.  The great principle of the Indian wars, for the last seventy years, has been the preservation of their lands.  On this, the French, English and Spanish have in turn excited them to active resistance against the expanding settlements of the whites.  It was on the principle of recovering their lands, that the French were their allies between the commencement of hostilities with the colonies, in 1754, and the peace of 1762; and subsequently kept up an excitement among them until the beginning of the revolution.  From this period, the English took the place of the French, and instigated them in a similar manner.  Their views and feelings on this point, may be gathered from their own words: 

“It was we,” say the Delawares, Mohicans and their kindred tribes, “who so kindly received the Europeans on their first arrival into our own country.  We took them by the hand and bid them welcome to sit down by our side, and live with us as brothers; but how did they requite our kindness?  They at first asked only for a little land, on which to raise bread for their families, and pasture for their cattle, which we freely gave them.  They saw the game in the woods, which the Great Spirit had given us for our subsistence, and they wanted it too.  They penetrated into the woods in quest of game, they discovered spots of land they also wanted, and because we were loth to part with it, as we saw they had already more than they had need of, they took it from us by force, and drove us to a great distance from our homes."[A]