They knew that the presence of the British in the Lake Posts meant Indian war; they knew that the Indians would war on them, whether they behaved well or ill, until the tribes suffered some signal overthrow; and they coveted the Indian lands with a desire as simple as it was brutal.

Nor were land hunger and revenge the only motives that stirred them to aggression; meaner feelings were mixed with the greed for untilled prairie and unfelled forest, and the fierce longing for blood.

Throughout our history as a nation, as long as we had a frontier, there was always a class of frontiersmen for whom an Indian war meant the chance to acquire wealth at the expense of the Government: and on the Ohio in 1792 and '93 there were plenty of men who, in the event of a campaign, hoped to make profit out of the goods, horses, and cattle they supplied the soldiers.
One of Madison's Kentucky friends wrote him with rather startling frankness that the welfare of the new State hinged on the advent of an army to assail the Indians, first, because of the defence it would give the settlers, and, secondly, because it would be the chief means for introducing into the country a sufficient quantity of money for circulation.

[Footnote: State Dep.MSS., Madison Papers, Hubbard Taylor to Madison, Jan.

3, 1792.] Madison himself evidently saw nothing out of the way in this twofold motive of the frontiersmen for wishing the presence of an army.