Besides their chiefs and
some Canadians, they were aided by the counsels of the two Girtys, and
McKee, renegado whites. We have made diligent enquiry touching the
biography of these men, particularly Simon Girty, a wretch of most
infamous notoriety in those times, as a more successful instigator of
Indian assault and massacre, than any name on record. Scarcely a
tortured captive escaped from the northern Indians, who could not tell
the share which this villain had in his sufferings--no burning or murder
of prisoners, at which he had not assisted by his presence or his
counsels. These refugees from our white settlements, added the
calculation and power of combining of the whites to the instinctive
cunning and ferocity of the savages. They possessed their thirst for
blood without their active or passive courage--blending the bad points
of character in the whites and Indians, without the good of either. The
cruelty of the Indians had some show of palliating circumstances, in the
steady encroachments of the whites upon them. Theirs was gratuitous,
coldblooded, and without visible motive, except that they appeared to
hate the race more inveterately for having fled from it. Yet Simon
Girty, like the Indians among whom he lived, sometimes took the freak of
kindness, nobody could divine why, and he once or twice saved an unhappy
captive from being roasted alive.
This vile renegado, consulted by the Indians as an oracle, lived in
plenty, smoked his pipe, and drank off his whisky in his log palace.
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