[Footnote: For instances of an Indian wearing this buffalo cap, with the horns on, see Kercheval and De Haas.] Before the snow was off the ground the war parties crossed the Ohio and fell on the frontiers from the Monongahela and Kanawha to the Kentucky.
[Footnote: State Department MSS.

for 1777, _passim_.

So successful were the Indian chiefs in hoodwinking the officers at Fort Pitt that some of the latter continued to believe that only three or four hundred Indians had gone on the war path.] On the Pennsylvanian and Virginian frontiers the panic was tremendous.
The people fled into the already existing forts, or hastily built others; where there were but two or three families in a place, they merely gathered into block-houses--stout log-cabins two stories high, with loop-holed walls, and the upper story projecting a little over the lower.

The savages, well armed with weapons supplied them from the British arsenals on the Great Lakes, spread over the country; and there ensued all the horrors incident to a war waged as relentlessly against the most helpless non-combatants as against the armed soldiers in the field.

Block-houses were surprised and burnt; bodies of militia were ambushed and destroyed.