hich to strike. Of course, the retaliatory blows of
the whites, like the strokes of the Indians, fell as often on the
innocent as on the guilty. During this summer, to revenge the death of a
couple of settlers, a backwoods Colonel, with the appropriate name of
Outlaw, fell on a friendly Cherokee town and killed two or three
Indians, besides plundering a white man, a North Carolina trader, who
happened to be in the town. Nevertheless, throughout 1786 the great
majority of the Cherokees remained quiet. [Footnote: Va. State Papers,
IV., pp. 162, 164, 176.]

Early in 1787, however, they felt the strain so severely that they
gathered in a great council and deliberated whether they should not
abandon their homes and move far out into the western wilderness; but
they could not yet make up their minds to leave their beloved mountains.
The North Carolina authorities wished to see them receive justice, but
all they could do was to gather the few Indian prisoners who had been
captured in the late wars and return them to the Cherokees. The Franklin
Government had opened a land office and disposed of all the lands
between the French Broad and the Tennessee, [Footnote: State Dept. MSS.,
vol. ii. No. 71. Letter to Edmund Randolph, Feb. 10, 1787; Letter of
Joseph Martin, of March 25, 1787; Talk from Piominigo, the Chickasaw
Chief, Feb. 15, 1787.] which territory North Carolina had guaranteed the
Cherokees; and when, on the authority of the Governor of North Carolina,
his representative ordered the settlers off the invaded land, they
treated his command with utter defiance. Not only the Creeks, but even
the distant Choctaws and Chickasaws became uneasy and irritated over the
American encroachments, while the French traders who came up the
Tennessee preached war to the Indians, and the Spanish Government
ordered all the American traders to be expelled from among the southern
tribes unless they would agree to take commissions from Spain and throw
off their allegiance to the United States.

In this same year the Cherokees became embroiled, not only with the
Franklin people but with the Kentuckians. The Chickamaugas, who were
mainly renegade Cherokees, were always ravaging in Kentucky. Colonel
John Logan had gathered a force to attack one of their war bands, but he
happened instead to stumble on a Cherokee party, which he scattered to
the winds with loss. The Kentuckians wrote to the Cherokee chiefs
explaining that the attack was an accide