. Letter of Benjamin Hawkins and Andrew Pickens,
December 30, 1785.] The Commissioners were at first much impressed by
the letters sent them by McGillivray, and the "talks" they received
through the Scotch, French, and English half-breed interpreters
[Footnote: _Do_., _e.g._, the letter of Galphin and Douzeazeaux, June
14, 1787.] from the outlandishly-named Muscogee chiefs--the Hallowing
King of the War Towns, the Fat King of the White or Peace Towns, the
White Bird King, the Mad Dog King, and many more. But they soon found
that the Creeks were quite as much to blame as the Georgians, and were
playing fast and loose with the United States, promising to enter into
treaties, and then refusing to attend; their flagrant and unprovoked
breaches of faith causing intense anger and mortification to the
Commissioners, whose patient efforts to serve them were so ill rewarded.
[Footnote: American State Papers, Vol. IV., p. 74, September 26, 1789.]
Moreover, to offset the Indian complaints of lands taken from them under
fraudulent treaties, the Georgians submitted lists [Footnote: _Do_., p.
77, October 5, 1789.] of hundreds of whites and blacks killed, wounded,
or captured, and of thousands of horses, horned cattle, and hogs
butchered or driven off by Indian war parties. The puzzled Commissioners
having at first been inclined to place the blame of the failure of peace
negotiations on the Georgians, next shifted the responsibility to
McGillivray, reporting that the Creeks were strongly in favor of peace.
The event proved that they were in error; for after McGillivray and his
fellow chiefs had come to New York, in the summer of 1790, and concluded
a solemn treaty of peace, the Indians whom they nominally represented
refused to be bound by it in any way, and continued without a change
their war of rapine and murder.

The Indians as Much to Blame as the Whites.

In truth the red men were as little disposed as the white to accept a
peace on any terms that were possible. The Secretary of War, who knew
nothing of Indians by actual contact, wrote that it would be indeed
pleasing "to a philosophic mind to reflect that, instead of
exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population ... we
had imparted our knowledge of cultivation and the arts to the
aboriginals of the country," thus preserving and civilizing them
[Footnote: American State Papers, Vol. IV., pp. 53, 57, 60, 77, 79, 81,
etc.]; and the public men who represent