riminal who resisted the law. The worst offenders fled to the
Mississippi Territory, there to live among Spaniards, Creoles, Indians,
and lawless Americans. Lawyers drove a thriving business; but they had
their own difficulties, to judge by one advertisement, which appears in
the issue of the _Gazette_ for March 23, 1793, where six of them give
notice that thereafter they will give no legal advice unless it is
legally paid for.

Endless Land Speculations.

All the settlers, or at least all the settlers who had any ambition to
rise in the world, were absorbed in land speculations: Blount,
Robertson, and the other leaders as much so as anybody. They were
continually in correspondence with one another about the purchase of
land warrants, and about laying them out in the best localities. Of
course there was much jealousy and rivalry in the effort to get the best
sites. Robertson, being farthest on the frontier, where there was most
wild land, had peculiar advantages. Very soon after he settled in the
Cumberland district at the close of the Revolutionary War, Blount had
entered into an agreement with him for a joint land speculation. Blount
was to purchase land claims from both officers and soldiers amounting in
all to fifty thousand acres and enter them for the Western Territory,
while Robertson was to survey and locate the claims, receiving one
fourth of the whole for his reward. [Footnote: Blount MSS., Agreement
between William Blount and James Robertson, Oct. 30, 1783.] Their
connection continued during Blount's term as Governor, and Blount's
letters to Robertson contain much advice as to how the warrants shall be
laid out. Wherever possible they were of course laid outside the Indian
boundaries; but, like every one else, Blount and Robertson knew that
eventually the Indian lands would come into the possession of the United
States, and in view of the utter confusion of the titles, and especially
in view of the way the Indians as well as the whites continually broke
the treaties and rendered it necessary to make new ones, both Blount and
Robertson were willing to place claims on the Indian lands and trust to
luck to make the claims good if ever a cession was made. The lands thus
located were not lands upon which any Indian village stood. Generally
they were tracts of wilderness through which the Indians occasionally
hunted, but as to which there was a question whether they had yet been
formally ceded to the governmen