1764, Nov.] PKISONERS AMONG THE INDIANS. 235 



among them went much farther, and asked permis- 

 sion to follow the army on its homeward march, 

 that they might hunt for the captives, and supply 

 them with better food than the military stores could 

 furnish. A young Seneca warrior had become 

 deeply enamoured of a Virginian girl. At great 

 risk of his life, he accompanied the troops far 

 within the limits of the settlements ; and, at every 

 night's encampment, approaching the quarters of 

 the captives as closely as the sentinels would per- 

 mit, he sat watching, with patient vigilance, to 

 catch a glimpse of his lost mistress. 



The Indian women, whom no idea of honor com- 

 pels to wear an iron mask, were far from emulating 

 the frigid demeanor of their lords. All day they 

 ran wailing through the camp ; and, when night 

 came, the hills and woods resounded with their 

 dreary lamentations.^ 



The word prisoner^ as applied to captives taken 

 by the Indians, is a misnomer, and conveys a wholly 

 false impression of their situation and treatment. 

 When the vengeance of the conquerors is sated ; 

 when they have shot, stabbed, burned, or beaten 



1 The outcries of the squaws, on such occasions, would put to shame 

 an Irish death-howl. The writer was once attached to a large band of 

 Indians, who, being on the march, arrived, a little after nightfall, at a spot 

 where, not long before, a party of their young men had been killed by the 

 enemy. The women instantly raised a most astounding clamor, some 

 two hundred voices joining in a discord as wild and dismal as the shriek- 

 ing of the damned in the Imferno ; while some of the chief mourners 

 gaslied their bodies and limbs with knives, uttering meanwhile most 

 piteous lamentations. A few days later, returning to the same encamp- 

 ment after darkness had closed in, a strange and startling effect was 

 produced by the prolonged wailings of several women, who were pacing 

 the neighboring hills, lamenting the death of a child, killed by the bite of 

 a rattlesnake. 



