I am fortunate to have the honor of commanding such brave men. I only wish the Indians had ventured an assault. They would have remembered it to the thousandth generation!... I forgot to tell you that they threw fire-arrows to burn our works, but they could not reach the buildings, nor even the rampart. Only two arrows came into the fort, one of which had the insolence to make free with my left leg.” This letter was written on the second of August. On the day before the Indians had all decamped. An event, soon to be described, had put an end to the attack, and relieved the tired garrison of their presence.[293] CHAPTER XIX. 1763. THE WAR ON THE BORDERS. Along the Western frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, terror reigned supreme. The Indian scalping-parties were ranging everywhere, laying waste the settlements, destroying the harvests, and butchering men, women, and children, with ruthless fury. Many hundreds of wretched fugitives flocked for refuge to Carlisle and the other towns of the border, bringing tales of inconceivable horror. Strong parties of armed men, who went out to reconnoitre the country, found every habitation reduced to cinders, and the half-burned bodies of the inmates lying among the smouldering ruins; while here and there was seen some miserable wretch, scalped and tomahawked, but still alive and conscious. One writing from the midst of these scenes declares that, in his opinion, a thousand families were driven from their homes; that, on both sides of the Susquehanna, the woods were filled with fugitives, without shelter and without food; and that, unless the havoc were speedily checked, the western part of Pennsylvania would be totally deserted, and Lancaster become the frontier town.[294] While these scenes were enacted on the borders of Pennsylvania and the more southern provinces, the settlers in the valley of the Mohawk, and even along the Hudson, were menaced with destruction. Had not the Six Nations been kept tranquil by the exertions of Sir William Johnson, the most disastrous results must have ensued. The Senecas and a few of the Cayugas were the only members of the confederacy who took part in the war. Venango, as we have seen, was destroyed by a party of Senecas, who soon after made a feeble attack upon Niagara. They blockaded it for a few days, with no other effect than that of confining the garrison within the walls, and, soon despairing of success, abandoned the attempt.