The Indian Wars, 1784-1787 155 



back; occasionally parties of settlers or hunters 

 stumbled across and scattered the prowling bands; 

 occasionally the Indian villages suffered from retal 

 iatory inroads. 



One attack, simple enough in its incidents, de 

 serves notice for other reasons. In 1784 a family 

 of "poor white" immigrants who had just settled in 

 Kentucky were attacked in the daytime, while in 

 the immediate neighborhood of their squalid cabin. 

 The father was shot, and one Indian was in the act 

 of tomahawking the six-year-old son, when an elder 

 brother, from the doorway of the cabin, shot the 

 savage. The Indians then fled. The boy thus 

 rescued grew up to become the father of Abraham 

 Lincoln. 31 



Now and then the monstrous uniformity of horror 

 in assault and reprisal was broken by some deed out 

 of the common ; some instance where despair nerved 

 the frame of woman or of half-grown boy; some 

 strange incident in the career of a backwoods hunt 

 er, whose profession perpetually exposed him to 

 Indian attack, but also trained him as naught else 

 could to evade and repel it. The wild turkey was 

 always much hunted by the settlers ; and one of the 

 common Indian tricks was to imitate the turkey call 

 and shoot the hunter when thus tolled to his foe's 

 ambush; but it was only less common for a skilled 

 Indian fighter to detect the ruse and himself creep 

 up and slay the would-be slayer. More than once, 

 when a cabin was attacked in the absence or after 



81 Hay and Nicolay. 



