There were American hamlets of log huts, and lonely American farm-houses, scattered through the wilderness for a distance of four hundred miles along the western frontier of Virginia. But the court and cabinet of Great Britain considered their weal or woe a matter of but little consequence compared with the national glory to be obtained in driving the French from this whole continent.[41] Fifteen hundred plumed, painted, howling savages were soon the allies of France, perpetrating deeds which one shudders to record. At midnight these demons of the human race would burst from the forest, and rush howling upon some hut where the poor defenceless emigrant, with his wife and his children, was tremblingly sleeping. In an hour the dreadful tragedy was completed. The yells of the savages drowned the shrieks of the mother and her babe, as they fell beneath the tomahawk. The cabin was in ashes. The savages had disappeared. The rising sun revealed but the gory corpses in their shocking mutilation. For the protection of the frontier, thus exposed to the greatest woes of which the imagination can conceive, Virginia raised a force of seven hundred men, which was placed under the experienced command of Colonel Washington. For three years he was engaged in these arduous but almost unavailing labors. No one could tell at what point the wary Indian would strike a blow. Having struck it, the demoniac band vanished into the glooms of the wilderness, where pursuit was impossible. There is some excuse to be found for the fiend-like deeds of the savages, in the ignorance, and in the principles of war which they and their ancestors had ever cherished. But there is no excuse whatever to be found for those French and English statesmen, who employed such agents for the accomplishment of their ambitious projects. The scenes of woe, which Washington often witnessed, were so dreadful that, in after life, he could seldom bear to recur to them. We will give one instance, which he has related, as illustrative of many others. One day as, with a small detachment of troops, he was traversing a portion of the frontier, he came to a solitary log cabin, in a little clearing, which the axe of a settler had effected in the heart of the forest. As they were approaching, through the woods, the report of a gun arrested their attention. Cautiously they crept through the underbrush, until they came in full sight of the cabin. Smoke was curling up through the roof, while a large party of savages, with piles of plunder by their side, were shouting and swinging their bleeding scalps, as they danced round their booty. As soon as they caught sight of the soldiers they fled into the forest with the swiftness of deer. In the following words Washington describes the scene which was then opened before them: