The incidents which I am about to relate, suggest some very natural reflections. He who now migrates to the mighty west, in pursuit of wealth or fame, encounters none of those innumerable hidden and open dangers which thronged the way of those who turned their faces thitherward half a century ago; he feels not, nor need he possess, the adventurous spirit, the intrepidity, and the astonishing resoluteness and daring of those brave and hardy pioneers. They ascended the lofty Alleghany, and looked off upon the ancient and almost unbroken forest, extending far beyond the Mississippi, and covering the vast valley which lay between them and the Rocky Mountains; while only here and there a small settlement, composed of a few families collected together for mutual convenience, and defence against their common enemy, disturbed its solitary reign. So soon as they entered upon it, they met with a foe the most wary and subtle, the most sleepless and untiring in his hostility, the most vigilant to seize every opportunity to satiate his bloodthirsty disposition, inflicting the most cruel and merciless tortures, and murdering indiscriminately every age and sex; the bold and dauntless husband, who met him hand to hand in murderous conflict, the helpless imploring wife, and the innocent babe sleeping upon her bosom, ruthlessly torn from her dying grasp, fell alike beneath the deadly blow of the savage, as he smiled with a fiendish satisfaction over his bloody deed. And is there no cause to mitigate our anger when contemplating such scenes? Is there no excuse for the wild, uncivilized Indian, though pursuing with a hatred the most vindictive his enemy, yet displaying towards his _friend_ a noble and disinterested conduct which puts to blush the enlightened white man? Yes! They had discovered the designs of the whites; oppressed with a thousand wrongs, driven from their homes and the tombs of their ancestors, to which they are more fondly attached than any other people,--"hunted down like the partridge upon the mountain," they had formed a deadly hostility, an undying revenge against those, whom, when few and defenceless, they had received with open arms, and by whom they were now, viper like, stung to the heart; and they had stationed themselves upon the verge, and lurked throughout what they believed to be their own possession, their own inheritance,--determined to dispute every foot of it with those who were encroaching upon them, and pursuing with a steady purpose their extermination.