The War in the Northwest 205 



Nor is it right that the whole of the frontier folk 

 should bear the blame for the deed. It is a fact, 

 honorable and worthy of mention, that the Kentuck- 

 ians were never implicated in this or any similar 

 massacre. 17 



But at the time, and in their own neighborhood 

 the corner of the Upper Ohio valley where Penn- 

 sylvania and Virginia touch, the conduct of the 

 murderers of the Moravians roused no condemna- 

 tion. The borderers at first felt about it as the 

 English Whigs originally felt about the massacre 

 of Glencoe. For some time the true circumstances 

 of the affair were not widely known among them. 

 They were hot with wrath against all the red-skinned 

 race; and they rejoiced to hear of the death of a 

 number of treacherous Indians who pretended to be 



act of barbarity equal to any thing I ever knew to be com- 

 mitted by the savages themselves, except the burning of 

 prisoners." 



17 The Germans of up-country North Carolina were guilty 

 of as brutal massacres as the Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen of 

 Pennsylvania. See Adair, 245. There are two or three in- 

 dividual instances of the barbarity of Kentuckians one being 

 to the credit of McGarry but they are singularly few, when 

 the length and the dreadful nature of their Indian wars are 

 taken into account. Throughout their history the Kentucky 

 pioneers had the right on their side in their dealings with the 

 Indians. They were not wanton aggressors ; they entered 

 upon vacant hunting-grounds, to which no tribe had a clear 

 title, and to which most even of the doubtful titles had been 

 fairly extinguished. They fought their foes fiercely, with 

 varying fortune, and eventually wrested the land from them ; 

 but they very rarely wronged them ; and for the numerous 

 deeds of fearful cruelty that were done on Kentucky soil, the 

 Indians were in almost every case to blame. 



