HOW WE CONQUERED HALLEOK TUSTENUGGEE. 223 



wound, or turned to strike the pursuing soldier whose toilsome 

 march he had been watching for days, or he disappeared into its 

 mirage with his family, like ghosts, without a trail and beyond all 

 successful pursuit. 



The story of this war has yet to be written. On the one side 

 were Generals Scott, Clinch, and Worth, names that were dear to 

 their countrymen, and millions of money, and loving chroniclers 

 of gallant deeds. They hunted the Indians and their negro allies 

 with troops, boats and dogs, and renegade spies crueller than the 

 hounds, entrapped their chiefs at the council board, and broke up 

 the organisation of their bands. On the other side was a people 

 deriving their weapons only from their foes, insufficiently provided 

 and suffering every want. They resisted attack with patriotism, 

 and battled in swamp, and water, and reedy fastness, for thrice as 

 many years as the Americans were fighting their War of Inde- 

 pendence, with no historian to record their protests, their councils, 

 their sufferings, or heroic deeds. It is well known that Molly 

 Starks were there at every battle, for their bodies lay on the 

 field when the fight was done. Bunker Hill was represented in 

 every cypress gall. The cruel winter at Valley Forge they under- 

 went, though their torture was the miasma and the heat. Their 

 capital was burned at Palacklickaha, and their fruitful fields were 

 destroyed. The old prison-ship lay moored for them in Tampa 

 Bay, and their highest chiefs were captives in its hold. They had 

 their Sumpters and Marions in Chekika and Hospetarke, their 

 Pulaski in Holartoochee, and their Washington in Osceola; and 

 had their Arnolds been discovered, they would be living still, an 

 independent people. 



If men are to be esteemed for high virtues in proportion to the 

 obstacles they had to overcome in attaining them, and if the praise 

 of comparative great deeds is due mostly to those who have from 

 lower life made themselves eminent, the brave resistance of the 

 'savage in his swamp is a higher chivalry than the war of a civilised 

 people, with its wealth of reason and example ; and if it does not 

 stand on historic page in brighter light, it is because the page is 

 written by the civilised race more as a defence than a veritable 

 history. 



