228 The Winning of the West 



course of that stream. The cession by the Iroquois 

 of these same hunting-grounds, at the treaty of Fort 

 Stanwix, while it gave the whites a colorable title, 

 merely angered the Northwestern Indians. Half 

 a century earlier they would hardly have dared dis- 

 pute the power of the Six Nations to do what they 

 chose with any land that could be reached by their 

 war parties; but in 1774 they felt quite able to hold 

 their own against their old oppressors, and had no 

 intention of acquiescing in any arrangement the 

 latter might make, unless it was also clearly to their 

 own advantage. 



In the decade before Lord Dunmore's war there 

 had been much mutual wrong-doing between the 

 Northwestern Indians and the Virginian borderers; 

 but on the whole the latter had occupied the position 

 of being sinned against more often than that of sin- 

 ning. The chief offence of the whites was that they 

 trespassed upon uninhabited lands, which they forth- 

 with proceeded to cultivate, instead of merely roam- 

 ing over them to hunt the game and butcher one 

 another. Doubtless occasional white men would 

 murder an Indian if they got a chance, and the 

 traders almost invariably cheated the tribesmen. 

 But as a whole the traders were Indian rather than 

 white in their sympathies, and the whites rarely 

 made forays against their foes avowedly for horses 

 and plunder, while the Indians on their side were 

 continually indulging in such inroads. Every year 

 parties of young red warriors crossed the Ohio to 

 plunder the outlying farms, burn down the build- 



