The borderers are usually as suspicious as they
are independent, and their self-sufficiency and self-reliance often
degenerate into mere lawlessness and defiance of all restraint.
The Regular Officers Side with the French against the Americans.
The Federal officers in the backwoods north of the Ohio got on badly
with the backwoodsmen. Harmar took the side of the French Creoles, and
warmly denounced the acts of the frontiersmen who had come in among
them. [Footnote: State Dept. MSS., No. 150, vol. ii., Harmar to Le
Grasse and Busseron, June 29, 1787.] In his letter to the Creoles he
alluded to Clark's Vincennes garrison as "a set of lawless banditti,"
and explained that his own troops were regulars, who would treat with
justice both the French and Indians. Harmar never made much effort to
conceal dislike of the borderers. In one letter he alludes to a Delaware
chief as "a manly old fellow, and much more of a gentleman than the
generality of these frontier people." [Footnote: _Do_., Harmar to the
Secretary of War, March 9, 1788.] Naturally, there was little love lost
between the bitterly prejudiced old army officer, fixed and rigid in all
his ideas, and the equally prejudiced backwoodsmen, whose ways of
looking at almost all questions were antipodal to his.
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