Many such occurred
on all parts of this frontier in each of the terrible years of Indian
warfare. They varied infinitely in detail, but they were monotonously
alike in their characteristics of stealthy approach, of sudden onfall,
and of butcherly cruelty; and there was also a terrible sameness in the
brutality and ruthlessness with which the whites, as occasion offered,
wreaked their revenge. Generally the Indian war parties were successful,
and suffered comparatively little, making their attacks by surprise, and
by preference on unarmed men cumbered with women and children.
Occasionally they were beaten back; occasionally parties of settlers or
hunters stumbled across and scattered the prowling bands; occasionally
the Indian villages suffered from retaliatory inroads.
Attack on the Lincoln Family.
One attack, simple enough in its incidents, deserves notice for other
reasons. In 1784 a family of "poor white" immigrants who had just
settled in Kentucky were attacked in the daytime, while in the immediate
neighborhood of their squalid cabin. The father was shot, and one Indian
was in the act of tomahawking the six-year-old son, when an elder
brother, from the doorway of the cabin, shot the savage.
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