Taken in part from:

Border Settlers of Northwestern Virginia

Written by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter

The settlers on  the upper waters of the Monongahela often went in canoes and flat-boats to Fort Pitt, where they exchanged skins, furs, jerked venison, and other products of the wilderness for ammunition and necessaries.
Jesse Hughes and Henry McWhorter made a trip together. One day they put ashore where a number of children were playing,  among them a little Indian boy.  The incident which followed I will give in McWhorter's own words.
"The instant that Jesse caught sight of the little Indian boy his face blazed with hatred. I saw the devil flash in his eye, as feigning great good humor, he called out, "Children, don't you want to take a boat ride?"  Pleased with a prospective glide over  the still waters of the Monongahela, one and all came running towards the boat. 
Perceiving Hughes' cunning ruse to get the little Indian into his clutches, I picked up an oar, and gruffly ordering the children away, quickly shoved the boat from the bank. When  safely away, I turned to Hughes and said, "Now, Jesse, ain't you ashamed?"  "What have I done?" he sullenly asked. "What have you done? why, you intended to kill that little Indian boy.  I saw it in your every move and look, the moment you got sight of the little fellow " "Yes," he said "I intended when we got into mid-stream to stick my knife in him and throw him overboard."  When I remonstrated with him about this, he said, "Damn it, he's an Injun!"  Brutal ? Yes; but let us not deal too harshly with the memory of Jesse Hughes, whose only schooling was that acquired  upon a bloody frontier. Naturally such a training was void of sentiment. It contained not the elements of charity or mercy. It was narrow, cramped and selfish. It saw only the smoldering  ruins of the settler's cabin, its scalped inmates; the helpless 
swept into captivity, with visions of the gauntlet and the torture stake, The whites believed their own actions justifiable and in the interests of their civilization. The conquest of a country has always brought about the
possibility of barbarous conditions,  and but comparatively few of our frontiersmen have possessed the sturdiness of purpose to avoid the inhuman actions prompted by them, But there were two sides. The Indians were cruelly wronged. They were deceived, defrauded and  treacherously dealt with. Their lands were encroached upon, in gross violation of solemn treaty rights. Their game was destroyed.  Friendlies were shot down without provocation, and entire families and bands of hunters were murdered, in the fastnesses of their own domain. There were schemes promulgated, and I believe employed, by those high in authority, for the indiscriminate destruction of the Indians, far more hellish than those ever dreamed of by the  wilderness warrior. We should be just and place where they belong the various causes for the brutalities enacted on the border.

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