They varied infinitely in detail, but they were monotonously alike in their characteristics of stealthy approach, of sudden onfall, and of butcherly cruelty; and there was also a terrible sameness in the brutality and ruthlessness with which the whites, as occasion offered, wreaked their revenge.

Generally the Indian war parties were successful, and suffered comparatively little, making their attacks by surprise, and by preference on unarmed men cumbered with women and children.
Occasionally they were beaten back; occasionally parties of settlers or hunters stumbled across and scattered the prowling bands; occasionally the Indian villages suffered from retaliatory inroads.
Attack on the Lincoln Family.
One attack, simple enough in its incidents, deserves notice for other reasons.

In 1784 a family of "poor white" immigrants who had just settled in Kentucky were attacked in the daytime, while in the immediate neighborhood of their squalid cabin.

The father was shot, and one Indian was in the act of tomahawking the six-year-old son, when an elder brother, from the doorway of the cabin, shot the savage.

The Indians then fled.