[Footnote: Putnam, p.

107, talks as if the settlers were utterly unused to Indian warfare, saying that until the first murder occurred, in this spring, "few, if any" of them had ever gazed on the victim of scalping-knife and tomahawk.

This is a curiously absurd statement.

Many of the settlers were veteran Indian fighters.

Almost all of them had been born and brought up on the frontier, amid a succession of Indian wars.