The causes of the strife for which the red men were making ready must be briefly noted to help us form a just opinion of the deeds that followed.

Early writers have usually represented the frontiersmen as saints in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without the shadow of a claim on either the land or humanity.

Many later writers have merely reversed the shield.

The truth is that the Indians and the borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both.

Paradoxically, they grew like enough to hate one another with a savage hatred--and both wanted the land.
Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men.