334 The Winning of the West 



on the frontier especially when put in charge of 

 Indian reservations or of French or Spanish com 

 munities have almost always been more or less at 

 swords-points with the stubborn, cross-grained pio 

 neers. The borderers are usually as suspicious as 

 they are independent, and their self-sufficiency and 

 self-reliance often degenerate into mere lawlessness 

 and defiance of all restraint. 



The Federal officers in the backwoods north of 

 the Ohio got on badly with the backwoodsmen. 

 Harmar took the side of the French Creoles, and 

 warmly denounced the acts of the frontiersmen who 

 had come in among them. 7 In his letter to the Cre 

 oles he alluded to Clark's Vincennes garrison as 

 "a set of lawless banditti," and explained that his 

 own troops were regulars, who would treat with 

 justice both the French and Indians. Harmar never 

 made much effort to conceal his dislike of the border 

 ers. In one letter he alludes to a Delaware chief as 

 "a manly old fellow, and much more of a gentleman 

 than the generality of these frontier people." 8 Nat 

 urally, there was little love lost between the bitterly 

 prejudiced old army officer, fixed and rigid in all 

 his ideas, and the equally prejudiced backwoodsmen, 

 whose ways of looking at almost all questions were 

 antipodal to his. 



The Creoles of the Illinois and Vincennes sent 

 warm letters of welcome to Harmar. The Ameri- 



7 State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. II, Harmar to Le Grasse 

 and Busseron, June 29, 1787. 



8 Do., Harmar to the Secretary of War, March 9, 1788. 



