In the Current of the Revolution 29 



peeled post into which they struck their hatchets. 

 The hereditary sachems, the peace chiefs, could no 

 longer control the young men. The braves made 

 ready their weapons and battle gear; their bodies 

 were painted red and black, the plumes of the war 

 eagle were braided into their long scalp locks, and 

 some put on necklaces of bears' claws, and head- 

 dresses made of panther skin, or of the shaggy and 

 horned frontlet of the buffalo. 10 Before the snow 

 was off the ground the war parties crossed the Ohio 

 and fell on the frontiers from the Monongahela and 

 Kanawha to the Kentucky. 11 



On the Pennsylvanian and Virginian frontiers the 

 panic was tremendous. The people fled into the al- 

 ready existing forts, or hastily built others; where 

 there were but two or three families in a place, 

 they merely gathered into block-houses stout log- 

 cabins two stories high, with loop-holed walls, and 

 the upper story projecting a little over the lower. 

 The savages, well armed with weapons supplied 

 them from the British arsenals on the Great Lakes, 

 spread over the country; and there ensued all the 

 horrors incident to a war waged as relentlessly 

 against the most helpless non-combatants as against 

 the armed soldiers in the field. Block-houses were 

 surprised and burned; bodies of militia were am- 



10 For instances of an Indian wearing this buffalo cap, with 

 the horns on, see Kercheval and De Haas. 



11 State Department MSS. for 1777, passim. So successful 

 were the Indian chiefs in hoodwinking the officers at Fort 

 Pitt that some of the latter continued to believe that only 

 three or four hundred Indians had gone^on the warpath. 



