It is the time-honored custom of historians of the frontier to consider Indians as all wrong and whites as all right; and that, of course, was the opinion of the borderers themselves--of Daniel Boone and all the men of his day. But we are now far enough removed from these events, and the fierce passions they engendered, to see them more clearly. The Indian was a savage and fought like a savage--cruel, bloodthirsty, unrelenting, treacherous, seldom a respecter of childhood, of age, or of women. But one can not read closely the chronicles of border warfare without discovering that civilized men at times could, in fighting savages, descend quite as low in the scale as they, in bloodthirstiness and treachery. Some of the most atrocious acts in the pioneer history of Kentucky and the Middle West were performed by whites; and some of the most Christianlike deeds--there were many such on both sides--were those of painted savages. It is needless to blame either of the contending races; their conflict was inevitable. The frontiersman was generally unlettered, and used, without ceremony, to overcoming the obstacles which nature set in his path; one more patient could not have tamed the wilderness as quickly as he. His children often rose to high positions as scholars, statesmen, and diplomats. But he himself was a diamond in the rough, and not accustomed to nice ethical distinctions. To his mind the Indian was an inferior being, if not a child of Satan; he was not making the best use of the soil; his customs and habits of thought were such as to repel the British mind, however much they may have attracted the French. The tribesmen, whom the pioneer could not and would not understand, stood in his way, hence must be made to go or to die in his tracks. When the savage, quick to resentment, struck back, the turbulent passions of the overbearing white were aroused, and with compound interest he repaid the blow. Upon the theory that the devil must be fought with fire, the borderer not seldom adopted methods of reprisal that outdid the savage in brutality. The red man fighting, after his own wild standards, for all that he held most dear, and the white man, who brooks no opposition from an inferior race, hitting back with a fury sometimes increased by fear--such, in brief, is the blood-stained history of the American border. FOOTNOTES: [5] The children of Daniel Boone were as follows: James (born in 1757), Israel (1759), Susannah (1760), Jemima (1762), Lavinia (1766), Rebecca (1768), Daniel Morgan (1769), John B. (1773), and Nathan (1780). The four daughters all married and died in Kentucky. The two eldest sons were killed by Indians, the three younger emigrated to Missouri.