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Updated: May 29, 2025
He found going on in his forest, of which he set out to write, not merely flame-lighted scalpings and official rapacities and picturesque maraudings and quixotic pageants and the like. His theme was even greater than the mere gathering of all these raids and rapacities and maraudings and pageants into an informed racial, national struggle for the possession of a continent.
He drew the listening savages round him by his nervous eloquence; taunted them with recitals of past wrongs and insults; drew glowing pictures of triumphs and trophies within their reach; recounted tales of daring and romantic enterprise, of secret marchings, covert lurkings, midnight surprisals, sackings, burnings, plunderings, scalpings; together with the triumphant return, and the feasting and rejoicing of the victors.
Everybody went back there from time to time, to rest from the strangeness of being Indians in a world of pale-skinned folk. Joe could almost imagine the council. There'd be old, old men who could nearly remember the days of the tribe's former glory, who'd heard stories of forest warfare and zestful hunts, and scalpings and heroic deeds from their grandfathers.
He had already experienced enough of forest travel to know its hardships. A journey of four hundred miles seemed to him like going to the uttermost parts of the earth. As the pioneers had smoked their pipes at his father's cabin fire, he had heard many appalling accounts of bloody conflicts with the Indians, of massacres, scalpings, tortures, and captivity.
Both sides had practiced cruelties in guerrilla warfare; but the Patriots forgot Marion's raids, Simsbury mines, and the drumhead hangings, and remembered only Hessian brutalities, Indian scalpings, Tarleton's harryings, and the infamous prison ships of New York. The war had been a long one. The tide of battle had ebbed and flowed.
This proved to be just the life that suited him. He soon rose to have a great and bad influence on all the tribes. He became noted for his assisting the Indians in marauds, for his midnight forays, for his scalpings, and his efforts to capture white women, and for his devilish cunning and cruelty. For many years Girty was the Deathshead of the frontier.
Battles were fought; forts were stormed; and hideous stories about stakes, scalpings, and death-songs reached Europe, and inflamed that national animosity which the rivalry of ages had produced. The disputes between France and England came to a crisis at the very time when the tempest which had been gathering was about to burst on Prussia.
Why, oh why, had she ever been left to do this daring thing to leave civilization and come away from her good man and the quiet home awaiting her to certain death in the desert. All the stories of horrid scalpings she had ever heard appeared before her excited vision.
To them it was the paradise of the first pair, whose inhabitants had only to put forth their hands, and eat and enjoy. The depredations, captivities, and scalpings, of the Indians; the howling of the wolves; the diseases, and peculiar trials and difficulties of a new country, without houses, mills, and the most indispensable necessaries of civilized life, were all overlooked.
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