der two heads: they were the allies of a
tyrant who lived beyond the sea, and they were the friends of anarchy at
home. They were felt by the frontiersmen to be criminals rather than
ordinary foes. They included in their ranks the mass of men who had been
guilty of the two worst frontier crimes--horse-stealing and murder; and
their own feats were in the eyes of their neighbors in no way
distinguishable from those of other horse-thieves and murderers.
Accordingly the backwoodsmen soon grew to regard toryism as merely
another crime; and the courts sometimes executed equally summary justice
on tory, desperado, and stock-thief, holding each as having forfeited
his life.[4]

The backwoodsmen were engaged in a threefold contest. In the first
place, they were occasionally, but not often, opposed to the hired
British and German soldiers of a foreign king. Next, they were engaged
in a fierce civil war with the tories of their own number. Finally, they
were pitted against the Indians, in the ceaseless border struggle of a
rude, vigorous civilization to overcome an inevitably hostile savagery.
The regular British armies, marching to and fro in the course of their
long campaigns on the seaboard, rarely went far enough back to threaten
the frontiersmen; the latter had to do chiefly with tories led by
British chiefs, and with Indians instigated by British agents.

Soon after the conflict with the revolted colonists became one of arms
as well as one of opinions the British began to rouse the Indian tribes
to take their part. In the northwest they were at first unsuccessful;
the memory of Lord Dunmore's war was still fresh in the minds of the
tribes beyond the Ohio, and they remained for the most part neutral. The
Shawnees continued even in 1776 to send in to the Americans white
prisoners collected from among their outlying bands, in accordance with
the terms of the treaty entered into on the Pickaway plains.[5]

But the southwestern Indians were not held in check by memories of
recent defeat, and they were alarmed by the encroachments of the whites.
Although the Cherokees had regularly ceded to the Watauga settlers their
land, they still continued jealous of them; and both Creeks and
Cherokees were much irritated at the conduct of some of the lawless
Georgian frontiersmen.[6] The colonial authorities tried to put a stop
to this lawlessness, and one of the chief offenders was actually seized
and hung in the presence of two Indians.[7