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.
Hatred of the Indian, among the pioneers, was hereditary; there was scarcely a man on the frontier, who had not lost a father, a mother, or a brother, by the tomahawk; and not a few of them had suffered in their own persons. The child, who learned the rudiments of his scanty education at his mother's knee, must decipher the strange characters by the straggling light which penetrated the crevices between the logs; for, while the father was absent, in the field or on the war-path, the mother was obliged to bar the doors and barricade the windows against the savages. Thus, if he did not literally imbibe it with his mother's milk, one of the first things the pioneer learned, was dread, and consequently hatred, of the Indian. That feeling grew with his growth, strengthened with his strength--for a life upon the western border left but few days free from sights of blood or mementoes of the savage. The pioneer might go to the field in the morning, unsuspecting; and, at noon, returning, find his wife murdered and scalped, and the brains of his little ones dashed out against his own doorpost! And if a deadly hatred of the Indian took possession of his heart, who shall blame him? It may be said, the pioneer was an intruder, seeking to take forcible possession of the Indian's lands--and that it was natural that the Indian should resent the wrong after the manner of his race. Granted: and it was quite as natural that the pioneer should return the enmity, after the manner of _his_ race!