It has been said, perhaps truly, that a fierce, bloody spirit ruled the settlers in those early days. And it is unquestionable, that much of that contempt for the slow vengeance of a legal proceeding, which now distinguishes the people of the frontier west, originated then. It was, doubtless, an unforgiving--eminently an unchristian--spirit: but vengeance, sure and swift, was the only thing which could impress the hostile savage. And, if example, in a matter of this sort, could be availing, for their severity to the Indians, they had the highest! The eastern colonists--good men and true--"willing to exterminate the savages," says Bancroft,[70] who is certainly not their enemy, offered a bounty for every Indian scalp--as we, in the west, do for the scalps of wolves! "To regular forces under pay, the grant was _ten_ pounds--to volunteers, in actual service, _twice that sum_; but if men would, of themselves, without pay, make up parties and patrol the forests in search of Indians, _as of old the woods were scoured for wild beasts_, the chase was invigorated by the promised 'encouragement of _fifty_ pounds per scalp!'" The "fruitless cruelties" of the Indian allies of the French in Canada, says the historian, gave birth to these humane and nicely-graduated enactments! Nor is our admiration of their Christian spirit in the least diminished, when we reflect that nothing is recorded in history of "bounties on scalps" or "encouragement" to murder, offered by Frontenac, or any other French-Canadian governor, as a revenge for the horrible massacre at Montreal, or the many "fruitless cruelties" of the bloody Iroquois![71] The descendants of the men who gave these "bounties" and "encouragements," have, in our own day, caressed, and wept and lamented over the tawny murderer, Black-Hawk, and his "wrongs" and "misfortunes;" but the theatre of Indian warfare was then removed a little farther west; and the atrocities of Haverhill and Deerfield were perpetrated on the western prairies, and not amid the forests of the east! Yet I do not mean, by referring to this passage of history--or to the rivers of wasted sentiment poured out a few years ago--so much to condemn our forefathers, or to draw invidious comparisons between them and others, as to show, that the war of extermination, sometimes waged by western rangers, was not without example--that the cruelty and hatred of the pioneer to the barbarous Indian, might originate in exasperation, which even moved the puritans; and that the lamentations, over the fictitious "wrongs" of a turbulent and bloody savage, might have run in a channel nearer home.