Beadle's New Dime Novels: The Specter Chief — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 THE PHANTOM CHIEF. ‘¢stations,” the first promise of the future empire of Ken- tucky; but from these to the Mississippi, the eastera boundary of the then Spanish territory of Louisiana, there were only one or two French posts. The feelings of the borderers toward the red men were always hostile—in many instances inhuman. Repeated ’ Gullisions of individuals were followed by the onset of large parties, so that during the years immediately pre- ceding the period of our tale, the hatred of the tribes be- yond the Ohio had been deepening, until it had become so fierce that little was neejed to bring on a general war From their principal villages, there were opened converg- ing war-paths towards the towns of the South, the main route passing through a gap in the “ Ouasiota,” (or as they are now termed, Cumberland) mountains. Bands of armed and painted warriors were frequently on the march to ‘‘strike’’ their ancient enemies, who were not slow to seek reprisals by parties of their own. So incessant, in- deed, were these interchanges of hostility, that the regions watered by the Kentucky river were rendered too unsafe for the residence of any of the bellicerents, and was enter- ed only as a field of battle. Its significant name, ‘‘The Dark and Bloody Ground,” which it received from the In- dians, manifests the horrid uses to which it had been abandoned, Into this devoted region, which the treaty of Fort Stanwix bad not tranquilized, the hardy pioneers of 1769-70 ventured to penetrate. Exposed, as they and their successors were, to the vindictiveness of defeated, or the wanton cruelty of successful combatants, it naturally hap- pened that encounters of a deadly character befel the ad- | venturous backwoodsman; and often the massacre of a ‘surprised family bore dreadful witness of the hazards of western settlement. Thus stimulated. as well as by the causes before acverted to, the animosity between the whites and the Indians had reached a violence which a/l- mitted of no certain control; a casual meeting between a borderer and one of his savage neighbors was, in many instances, the sigual of death to one or both of them. Buill there was uo such open or combined actioa as sus Comicbooks..c x * om, 4s <4