villages in one district, and fifteen in another, all lying
quite near each other: At length the Shawanoes departed from
Kentucky, and seem to have gone to the upper part of the
Carolinas, and to the coast of Florida, and ever after proved a
migratory people. They were evidently 'subdued,' as Colden,
Evans, and Pownall inform us, and the decisive battle was
fought at Sandy Island, where a vital blow was given to the
balance of power on the Ohio, which decided finally the fall of
Kentucky with its ancient inhabitants.

"It was this conquest that gave to the powerful Iroquois all
the title they ever acquired to Kentucky. At the peace of
Ryswick, in 1697, their right to their western conquests was
fully acknowledged; and at the treaty of Lancaster, in
Pennsylvania, in 1744, they ceded to Virginia all their lands
west of that colony. In 1752, the Shawanoes and other western
tribes, at Logstown on the Ohio, confirmed the Lancaster
treaty, and sold their claim to the country south of the Ohio;
and, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, in 1768, the Six Nations
made a new cession of their claim to Kentucky as low as the
Cherokee or Tennessee River. Up to this period, the Cherokees
never so much as thought of contesting with the Iroquois their
claim to the Kentucky country; for some of the visiting
Cherokees, while on their route to attend the Fort Stanwix
treaty, killed game for their subsistence, and on their arrival
at Fort Stanwix, tendered the skins to the Six Nations, saying,
'They are yours, we killed them after passing the Big River,'
the name by which they had always designated the Tennessee. But
probably discovering that other Indian nations were driving a
good business by disposing of their distant land rights, the
Cherokees managed to hatch up some sort of claim, which they,
in part, relinquished to Virginia, at the treaty of Lochaber in
1770; and when Col. Donelson ran the line the following year,
the boundary was fixed, at the suggestion of the Cherokee
deputies, on the Kentucky River as the south-western line, as
they delighted, they said, in natural landmarks. This
considerably enlarged the cession, for which they received an
additional compensation.

"In 1772,