However, it became increasingly apparent that white and red men had little in common. The former were quick to recognize the Indians’ simplicity and to exploit it. If judged by civilized standards, they were a people living as children, naïve and simple. They roamed about seeking game and plunder. Something to eat, a shred of clothing, a partial shelter, and a touch of adornment sufficed. They would exchange much corn, meat, beaver, and deerskins for a handful of beads, an iron hatchet, knife, ax, awl, or—best of all—fire water. Articles of real value were first given cheaply for items of scarcely any value at all. Mere curiosity led them into many commercial pitfalls. Ross, the trader, said, “Our people might have loaded a seventy-five-gun ship with provisions bought with buttons and rings.”[159] In the opinion of the Indians, palefaces were weaklings under torture. Still, white folks possessed strong medicine capable of moving great boats upon water without paddles. They also set great store upon boundaries on land and upon scratches on paper, which they said meant the same thing yesterday, today, and forever, and when a chief touched the quill to make his mark at the end of a writing it might bring trouble for years to come. Of course, the whites then said it was a treaty of cession by which the tribe had agreed to move the Indian village away and leave the settlers alone. These strange white people had a passion for killing trees continually, for making more tobacco than they could smoke, and for sending most of it away in their ships. White men were always working, mostly at tasks fit only for squaws, and they were fond of getting other white men and black men, and even trying to get red men, to work for them. Palefaces rarely moved their houses or changed their wives, and they would eat little more in harvest, or after a kill, than at any other time. Their restraints and their lack of restraint were equally unaccountable; and their numbers were ever swelling and their demands ever continuing for more and more land. They were, in truth, unfriendly neighbors, unwilling to blend the colony with the tribe; but they were firm, and on occasion impolite, in living their own lives and crowding the red men out. This brought battle now and then and a few blond scalps to dangle, but in war, too, the whites were unreasonable. They would not wait for Indian summer to do battle, and when once they took the path they were not content with raids, ambushes, and surprise attacks, but they would persist in a campaign under staunch command long after sensible, spasmodic Indian folk had grown weary.[160]