In the thickly peopled districts life was reasonably safe, though the frontier proper was harried and the remote farms jeopardized and occasionally abandoned, [Footnote: Virginia State Papers, iv., 149, State Department MSS., No.
56, p.

271.] while the river route and the wilderness road were beset by the savages.

Where the country was at all well settled, the Indians did not attack in formidable war bands, like those that had assailed the forted villages in the early years of their existence; they skulked through the woods by twos and threes, and pounced only upon the helpless or the unsuspecting.
Nevertheless, if the warfare was not dangerous to the life and growth of the Commonwealth, it was fraught with undreamed-of woe and hardship to individual settlers and their families.

On the outlying farms no man could tell when the blow would fall.

Thus, in one backwoodsman's written reminiscences, there is a brief mention of a settler named Israel Hart, who, during one May night, in 1787, suffered much from a toothache.