Warfare Against American Indians on the Early Frontier

The whites soon copied from the Indians their system of individual and private warfare. They probably caused their foes far more damage and loss in this way than in the large expeditions.

Continuing Frontiersmen Before the American Revolution,
our selection from The Winning of the West by Theodore Roosevelt published in 1889. The selection is presented in nine easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Frontiersmen Before the American Revolution.

Time: 1769-1774
Place: Western Pennsylvania

A backwoods levy was formidable because of the high average courage and prowess of the individuals composing it; it was on its own ground much more effective than a like force of regular soldiers, but of course it could not be trusted on a long campaign. The backwoodsmen used their rifles better than the Indians, and also stood punishment better, but they never matched them in surprises nor in skill in taking advantage of cover, and very rarely equaled their discipline in the battle itself. After all, the pioneer was primarily a husbandman; the time spent in chopping trees and tilling the soil his foe spent in preparing for or practicing forest warfare, and so the former, thanks to the exercise of the very qualities which in the end gave him the possession of the soil, could not, as a rule, hope to rival his antagonist in the actual conflict itself. When large bodies of the red men and white borderers were pitted against each other, the former were if anything the more likely to have the advantage.[1] But the whites soon copied from the Indians their system of individual and private warfare, and they probably caused their foes far more damage and loss in this way than in the large expeditions. Many noted border scouts and Indian fighters — such men as Boone, Kenton, Wetzel, Brady, McCulloch, Mansker[2] — grew to overmatch their Indian foes at their own game and held themselves above the most renowned warriors. But these men carried the spirit of defiant self-reliance to such an extreme that their best work was always done when they were alone or in small parties of but four or five. They made long forays after scalps and horses, going a wonderful distance, enduring extreme hardship, risking the most terrible of deaths, and harrying the hostile tribes into a madness of terror and revengeful hatred.

[1: At the best such a frontier levy was composed of men of the type of Leatherstocking, Ishmael Bush, Tom Hutter, Harry March, Bill Kirby, and Aaron Thousandacres. When animated by a common and overmastering passion, such a body would be almost irresistible; but it could not hold together long, and there was generally a plentiful mixture of men less trained in woodcraft, and therefore useless in forest fighting, while if, as must generally be the case in any body, there were a number of cowards in the ranks, the total lack of discipline not only permitted them to flinch from their work with impunity, but also allowed them, by their example, to infect and demoralize their braver companions.]

[2: Haywood, DeHaas, Withers, McClung, and other border annalists, give innumerable anecdotes about these and many other men, illustrating their feats of fierce prowess and, too often, of brutal ferocity.]

As it was in military matters, so it was with the administration of justice by the frontiersmen; they had few courts, and knew but little law, and yet they contrived to preserve order and morality with rough effectiveness, by combining to frown down on the grosser misdeeds, and to punish the more flagrant misdoers. Perhaps the spirit in which they acted can be best shown by the recital of an incident in the career of the three McAfee brothers, who were among the pioneer hunters of Kentucky.[3] Previous to trying to move their families out to the new country, they made a cache of clothing, implements, and provisions, which in their absence was broken into and plundered. They caught the thief, “a little diminutive, red-headed white man,” a runaway convict servant from one of the tide-water counties of Virginia. In the first impulse of anger at finding that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees rushed at him to kill him with his tomahawk; but the weapon turned, the man was only knocked down, and his assailant’s gusty anger subsided as quickly as it had risen, giving way to a desire to do stern but fair justice. So, the three captors formed themselves into a court, examined into the case, heard the man in his own defense, and after due consultation decided that “according to their opinion of the laws he had forfeited his life, and ought to be hung”; but none of them were willing to execute the sentence in cold blood, and they ended by taking their prisoner back to his master.

[3: McAfee MSS. The story is told both in the “Autobiography of Robert McAfee,” and in the “History of the First Settlement on Salt River.”]

The incident was characteristic in more than one way. The prompt desire of the backwoodsman to avenge his own wrong; his momentary furious anger, speedily quelled and replaced by a dogged determination to be fair but to exact full retribution; the acting entirely without regard to legal forms or legal officials, but yet in a spirit which spoke well for the doer’s determination to uphold the essentials that make honest men law-abiding; together with the good faith of the whole proceeding, and the amusing ignorance that it would have been in the least unlawful to execute their own rather harsh sentence — all these were typical frontier traits. Some of the same traits appear in the treatment commonly adopted in the backwoods to meet the case — of painfully frequent occurrence in the times of Indian wars — where a man taken prisoner by the savages, and supposed to be murdered, returned after two or three years’ captivity, only to find his wife married again. In the wilderness a husband was almost a necessity to a woman; her surroundings made the loss of the protector and provider an appalling calamity; and the widow, no matter how sincere her sorrow, soon remarried—for there were many suitors where women were not over-plenty. If in such a case the one thought dead returned, the neighbors and the parties interested seem frequently to have held a sort of informal court, and to have decided that the woman should choose either of the two men she wished to be her husband, the other being pledged to submit to the decision and leave the settlement. Evidently no one had the least idea that there was any legal irregularity in such proceedings.

[Incidents of this sort are frequently mentioned. Generally, the woman went back to her first husband. “Early Times in Middle Tennessee,” John Carr, Nashville, 1859, p. 231.]

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