They were felt by the frontiersmen to be criminals rather than ordinary foes.

They included in their ranks the mass of men who had been guilty of the two worst frontier crimes--horse-stealing and murder; and their own feats were in the eyes of their neighbors in no way distinguishable from those of other horse-thieves and murderers.
Accordingly the backwoodsmen soon grew to regard toryism as merely another crime; and the courts sometimes executed equally summary justice on tory, desperado, and stock-thief, holding each as having forfeited his life.[4] The backwoodsmen were engaged in a threefold contest.

In the first place, they were occasionally, but not often, opposed to the hired British and German soldiers of a foreign king.

Next, they were engaged in a fierce civil war with the tories of their own number.

Finally, they were pitted against the Indians, in the ceaseless border struggle of a rude, vigorous civilization to overcome an inevitably hostile savagery.
The regular British armies, marching to and fro in the course of their long campaigns on the seaboard, rarely went far enough back to threaten the frontiersmen; the latter had to do chiefly with tories led by British chiefs, and with Indians instigated by British agents.
Soon after the conflict with the revolted colonists became one of arms as well as one of opinions the British began to rouse the Indian tribes to take their part.