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 Hast 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 
