the original offender. If they injured a white, all the whites might
make common cause against them; but if they injured a red man, though
there were sure to be plenty of whites who disapproved of it, there were
apt to be very few indeed whose disapproval took any active shape.

Each race stood by its own members, and each held all of the other race
responsible for the misdeeds of a few uncontrollable spirits; and this
clannishness among those of one color, and the refusal or the inability
to discriminate between the good and the bad of the other color were the
two most fruitful causes of border strife.[23] When, even if he sought
to prevent them, the innocent man was sure to suffer for the misdeeds of
the guilty, unless both joined together for defence, the former had no
alternative save to make common cause with the latter. Moreover, in a
sparse backwoods settlement, where the presence of a strong, vigorous
fighter was a source of safety to the whole community, it was impossible
to expect that he would be punished with severity for offences which, in
their hearts, his fellow townsmen could not help regarding as in some
sort a revenge for the injuries they had themselves suffered. Every
quiet, peaceable settler had either himself been grievously wronged, or
had been an eye-witness to wrongs done to his friends; and while these
were vivid in his mind, the corresponding wrongs done the Indians were
never brought home to him at all. If his son was scalped or his cattle
driven off, he could not be expected to remember that perhaps the
Indians who did the deed had themselves been cheated by a white trader,
or had lost a relative at the hands of some border ruffian, or felt
aggrieved because a hundred miles off some settler had built a cabin on
lands they considered their own. When he joined with other exasperated
and injured men to make a retaliatory inroad, his vengeance might or
might not fall on the heads of the real offenders; and, in any case, he
was often not in the frame of mind to put a stop to the outrages sure to