INDIAN HISTORY. 197 



war. The temperate climate of the coast, and the command- 

 ing neighbourhood of the fortress, made it a pleasant and safe 

 residence from the miasma and disorders of the interior country. 

 It was also the depot for military stores, the arsenal for 

 ammunition, and the harbour for the gun-boats. Civilised and 

 savage warfare here displayed their pomp and colouring in close 

 relief. The painted savage allies with their wives camped daily 

 by the walls or traded with the sutler ; the Indian runners, 

 who alone could thread the inner wilderness, came and went 

 to distant outposts ; and the little brown canoe of the savage, 

 so thin in texture that a pin could pierce it, and so light in 

 mould it left no wake in the water, floated side by side in the 

 ripples with the heavy gunboat of the soldier that some day was 

 destined to rake and crush to pieces its slighter opponent — fit 

 emblems both of the power and feebleness of the people of which 

 they were respectively the types. 



Fort Brooke often contained within its casemented walls other 

 and greater contrasts, and more stirring emotions than the material 

 landscape and pageantry of war and race. Here came the young 

 recruit, emulous of fame, with armour newly dight, and hither 

 returned from the cypress swamp or pathless everglade the soldier 

 whose brief campaign sent him home wounded, wasted, broken, 

 with his weapons untarnished, save by the rust, and his glory 

 unmade, except by his sufferings. Here fled for shelter the settler's 

 family from their burning home, the shipwrecked sailor from 

 pursuing storms, here the Indian chieftain came with his armed 

 band, wrapped in his wrought mantle and his stoic dignity, to treat 

 for peace or vindicate his race ; and here the captured warriors in 

 their damp prison ships shivered in sight of the warm life of their 

 native forests. Here "talks" were had with the tribes, treaties 

 signed, expeditions fitted out, forays revenged, and the barbaric life 

 of the woods mingled and flowed side by side with the more com- 

 plex forms of civilisation, as the Oswegatchie pushes its black 

 current into the blue waters of the St. Lawrence. 



The war that had been waging for over ten years through the 

 length and breadth of the peninsula was apparently no nearer its 

 termination than at any previous period. Small bands of Indians 



