But the notion that the massacre of Logan's people at Joshua Baker's house was the cause of the war is erroneous. For any one living in the country at the time to have believed it would be too ridiculous. That brutal affair was only one more brand added to a fire which had smoldered for ten years. It happened to be the last piece of violence before both red and white threw aside make-believe and settled down to the ghastly struggle for supremacy. Hunters bound for Kentucky had suffered none from the Indians except as they had a brush with small raiding-parties. But when Daniel Boone undertook to convey his wife and children and the families of his friends into the wonderland the natives would have none of it. In killing his son and young Russell, along with several of their companions, the Indians were merely serving notice of no thoroughfare for home-builders. So let us remember that Dunmore's War was the inevitable outcome of two alien races determined on the same prize, with each primed for a death-struggle by the memories of fearful wrongs. It is useless to argue which race gave the first cause for retaliation; it had been give and take between them for many years. Nor should our children's children, because of any tendency toward ancestor-worship, be allowed to believe that the whites were invincible and slaughtered more natives than they lost of their own people. There were white men as merciless and murderous as any Indians, and some of these had a rare score of killings to their discredit. Yet in a man-for-man account the Indians had all the best of it. Veterans of Braddock's War insisted that the frontier lost fifty whites for each red man killed. Bouquet and other leaders estimated the ratio in Pontiac's War to have been ten to one in favor of the Indians. This reduction proved that the settlers had learned something from the lessons taught in the old French War. Our people on the border knew all this and they were confident that in the struggle now upon them they would bring the count down to one for one.[1] So let the youngsters of the new day learn the truth; that is, that the backwoodsmen clung to their homes although suffering most hideously. Virginia understood she must sustain the full brunt of the war, inasmuch as she comprised the disputed frontier. It was upon Virginia that the red hatred centered. I never blamed the Indians for this hate for white cabins and cleared forests and permanent settlements. Nor should our dislike of the Indians incite sentimental people, ignorant of the red man's ways and lacking sympathy with our ambitions, to denounce us as being solely responsible for the brutal aspects such a struggle will always display. It should also be remembered that the men of Pennsylvania were chiefly concerned with trade. Their profits depended upon the natives remaining undisturbed in their ancient homes. Like the French they would keep the red man and his forests unchanged.