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ON THE WAR-PATH

WAR-CLUB AND HATCHET

FOLLOWING the advice of Owayneo, the Indians received the white explorers and settlers with great kindness and hospitality. But the white men were cruel and crafty and took advantage of the friendly red men because they wanted the Indian land and schemed by dishonest methods to obtain possession of large tracts. Soon the Indian saw his hunting grounds taken and his wigwam threatened with destruction. This injustice roused his warlike and cruel nature, and relations between the white man and the red man developed into a ceaseless warfare that penetrated into every section of the great continent. The former peace of the wilderness was then marred by one long succession of fierce fights and terrible massacres.

Indian warfare was always one of surprises, and ambuscades and fighting in a land of forest and thicket made such a method possible. For centuries the Indian youth had been taught this strange mode of attack. Trained by tests of endurance and of skill, and by knowledge gained from a hunter’s life of suffering, danger and fatigue, the Indian boy grew to manhood. He longed for the time when he, too, might strike the enemy and make a name for himself. The chiefs of the tribe instructed him in the language of the sky and the earth, in the smallest detail of woodcraft and in the keenest methods of finding a trail.