170 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



Soon after this, his brother, Squire Boone, joined them 

 with a small supply of necessaries, of which powder and shot 

 were the most important. 



John Stewart seems to have been a doomed man from the 

 beginning, and his blood was to be the first offered up in the 

 savage and unnatural struggle which was about to begin 

 between the Red man and his brother, the "long knife !" As 

 yet only incidental traders, the Jesuit missionaries, the Cana- 

 dian French, and a few explorers whom we have named, had 

 penetrated here and there on the different sides of this lovely 

 land, and had been met with that sort of surly endurance 

 which characterizes, always, the first intercourse of the savage 

 with the civilized trader or explorer. As yet no blood of the 

 white man had been shed in Kentucky. 



As Boone, his brother and Stewart were traversing the 

 forest this autumn, they were suddenly fired upon by a large 

 party of Indians from a cane-brake, and Stewart fell, mor- 

 tally wounded ! Resistance was useless, and the brothers 

 fled from the overwhelming force, and the scalping-knife 

 which was drawn around poor Stewart's skull, opened, with 

 its gory trophy, one of the most obstinate and bloody wars 

 that ever occurred between two races. 



Heretofore the most powerful aboriginal tribes of the north 

 and the south had made Kentucky the common battle-ground. 

 Taking the bloody wars between the Talegans and the Lenaps, 

 with the branch of the grand and famous tribe of Natches in 

 West Kentucky, and with the Sciotos in East Kentucky ; then 

 the later wars after the breaking up of the great Lenap con- 

 federacy, between the Senekas, the Mohawks, the powerful 

 tribes of Menguys, Wyandots, &c., down to the time of the great 

 Shawanee confederacy, and this beautiful land of Kentucky 

 had been the field and scene of all the darkest struggles ; 

 therefore it came to be called the "dark and bloody ground !" 



Indeed, considering the tremendous struggle between the 

 Otawas and the Shawanees for supremacy, in which the former 



