The more far-sighted and resolute among all the Indians, northern and southern, began to strive for a general union against the Americans. [Footnote:  Do., No. 20, pp. 321 and 459; No. 18, p. 140; No. 12, vol. ii., June 30. 1786.] In 1786 the northwestern Indians almost formed such a union.  Two thousand warriors gathered at the Shawnee towns and agreed to take up the hatchet against the Americans; British agents were present at the council; and even before the council was held, war parties were bringing into the Shawnee towns the scalps of American settlers, and prisoners, both men and women, who were burned at the stake. [Footnote:  Do., No. 60, p. 277, Sept. 13, 1786.] But the jealousy and irresolution of the tribes prevented the actual formation of a league.

The Federal Government still feebly hoped for peace; and in the vain endeavors to avoid irritating the Indians forbade all hostile expeditions into the Indian country—­though these expeditions offered the one hope of subduing the savages and preventing their inroads.  By 1786 the settlers generally, including all their leaders, such as Clark, [Footnote:  Do., No. 50, p. 279.  Clark to R. H. Lee.] had become convinced that the treaties were utterly futile, and that the only right policy was one of resolute war.

    The War Inevitable.

In truth the war was unavoidable.  The claims and desires of the two parties were irreconcilable.  Treaties and truces were palliatives which did not touch the real underlying trouble.  The white settlers were unflinchingly bent on seizing the land over which the Indians roamed but which they did not in any true sense own or occupy.  In return the Indians were determined at all costs and hazards to keep the men of chain and compass, and of axe and rifle, and the forest-felling settlers who followed them, out of their vast and lonely hunting-grounds.  Nothing but the actual shock of battle could decide the quarrel.  The display of overmastering, overwhelming force might have cowed the Indians; but it was not possible for the United States, or for any European power, ever to exert or display such force far beyond the limits of the settled country.  In consequence the warlike tribes were not then, and never have been since, quelled save by actual hard fighting, until they were overawed by the settlement of all the neighboring lands.

Nor was there any alternative to these Indian wars.  It is idle folly to speak of them as being the fault of the United States Government; and it is even more idle to say that they could have been averted by treaty.  Here and there, under exceptional circumstances or when a given tribe was feeble and unwarlike, the whites might gain the ground by a treaty entered into of their own free will by the Indians, without the least duress; but this was not possible with warlike and powerful tribes when once they realized that they were threatened with serious encroachment on their