It is primeval warfare,
and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and of iron. All
the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two
thousand years is lost. It is a warfare where no pity is shown to
non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the
vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of
such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization,
speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of
hideous brutality. The armies are neither led by trained officers nor
made up of regular troops--they are composed of armed settlers, fierce
and wayward men, whose ungovernable passions are unrestrained by
discipline, who have many grievous wrongs to redress, and who look on
their enemies with a mixture of contempt and loathing, of dread and
intense hatred. When the clash comes between these men and their sombre
foes, too often there follow deeds of enormous, of incredible, of
indescribable horror. It is impossible to dwell without a shudder on the
monstrous woe and misery of such a contest.
The Lake Posts.
The men of Kentucky and of the infant Northwest would have found their
struggle with the Indians dangerous enough in itself; but there was an
added element of menace in the fact that back of the Indians stood the
British.
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