Those who prophesied an Indian war were not mistaken. When the
snowy hunting season had passed and the "Powwowing Days" were
come, the Indian war drum rattled in the medicine house from the
borders of Pennsylvania to those of Carolina. The causes of the
strife for which the red men were making ready must be briefly
noted to help us form a just opinion of the deeds that followed.
Early writers have usually represented the frontiersmen as saints
in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without the shadow of a
claim on either the land or humanity. Many later writers have
merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the
borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both.
Paradoxically, they grew like enough to hate one another with a
savage hatred--and both wanted the land.
Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men.
Tidewater officials held solemn powwows with the chiefs, gave
wampum strings, and forthwith incorporated.* Chiefs blessed their
white brothers who had "forever brightened the chain of
friendship," departed home, and proceeded to brighten the blades
of their tomahawks and to await, not long, the opportunity to use
them on casual hunters who carried in their kits the compass, the
"land-stealer." Usually the surveying hunter was a borderer; and
on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto.
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