When the keg
was empty, brandy was brought by the kettleful and ladled out
with large wooden spoons; and this was kept up until the last
skin had been disposed of. Then, dejected, wounded, lamed, with
their fine new shirts torn, their blankets burned, and with
nothing but their ammunition and tobacco saved, they would start
off down the river to hunt in the Ohio country and begin again
the same round of alternating toil and debauchery. In the history
of the country there is hardly a more depressing chapter than
that which records the easy descent of the red man, once his
taste for "fire water" was developed, to bestiality and
impotence.
The coming on of the Revolution produced no immediate effects in
the West. The meaning of the occurrences round Boston was but
slowly grasped by the frontier folk. There was little indeed that
the Westerners could do to help the cause of the eastern
patriots, and most of them, if left alone, would have been only
distant spectators of the conflict. But orders given to the
British agents and commanders called for the ravaging of the
trans-Alleghany country; and as a consequence the West became an
important theater of hostilities.
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