Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 231 



There were on the border at the moment three or 

 four men whose names are so intimately bound up 

 with the history of this war, that they deserve a 

 brief mention. One was Michael Cresap, a Mary- 

 land frontiersman, who had come to the banks of 

 the Ohio with the purpose of making a home for his 

 family. 17 He was of the regular pioneer type; a 

 good woodsman, sturdy and brave, a fearless fighter, 

 devoted to his friends and his country; but also, 

 when his blood was heated, and his savage instincts 

 fairly roused, inclined to regard any red man, 

 whether hostile or friendly, as a 'being who should 

 be slain on sight. Nor did he condemn the brutal 

 deeds done by others on innocent Indians. 



The next was a man named Greathouse, of whom 

 it is enough to know that, together with certain 

 other men whose names have for the most part, 

 by a merciful chance, been forgotten, 18 he did a deed 



less, at least, some faint shadow of proof is advanced. When 

 the Revolutionary war broke out, however, the earl, undoubt- 

 edly, like so many other British officials, advocated the most 

 outrageous measures to put down the insurgent colonists. 



17 See Brantz Mayer, p. 86, for a very proper attack on 

 those historians who stigmatize as land-jobbers and specula- 

 tors the perfectly honest settlers, whose encroachments on 

 the Indian hunting-grounds were so bitterly resented by the 

 savages. Such attacks are mere pieces of sentimental injus- 

 tice. The settlers were perfectly right in feeling that they 

 had a right to settle on the vast stretches of unoccupied 

 ground, however wrong some of their individual deeds may 

 have been. But Mayer, following Jacobs, "Life of Cresap," 

 undoubtedly paints his hero in altogether too bright colors. 



18 Sappington, Tomlinson, and Baker were the names of 

 three of his fellow-miscreants. See Jefferson MSS. 



