A long course of such aggressions and retaliations resulted, by the year 1791, in all the Northwestern Indians going on the war-path.

The hostile tribes had murdered and plundered the frontiersmen; the vengeance of the latter, as often as not, had fallen on friendly tribes; and these justly angered friendly tribes usually signalized their taking the red hatchet by some act of treacherous hostility directed against the settlers who had not molested them.
Treachery of the Friendly Delawares.
In the late winter of 1791 the hitherto friendly Delawares who hunted or traded along the western frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia proper took this manner of showing that they had joined the open foes of the Americans.

A big band of warriors spread up and down the Alleghany for about forty miles, and on the 9th of February attacked all the outlying settlements.

The Indians who delivered this attack had long been on intimate terms with the Alleghany settlers, who were accustomed to see them in and about their houses; and as the savages acted with seeming friendship to the last moment, they were able to take the settlers completely unawares, so that no effective resistance was made.

[Footnote: "American Pioneer," I., 44; Narrative of John Brickell.] Some settlers were killed and some captured.