the west and
southeast; and much of the land which was thus ceded they had ceded
before. Nevertheless, the peace thus solemnly made was immediately
violated by the Indians themselves. The whites were not the aggressors
in any way, and, on the contrary, thanks to the wish of the United
States authorities for peace, and to the care with which Blount strove
to carry out the will of the Federal Government, they for a long time
refrained even from retaliating when injured; yet the Indians robbed and
plundered them even more freely than when the whites themselves had been
the aggressors and had broken the treaty.

Confusion of the Treaties.

Before making the treaty of Holston Blount had been in correspondence
with Benjamin Hawkins, a man who had always been greatly interested in
Indian affairs. He was a prominent politician in North Carolina, and
afterwards for many years agent among the Southern Indians. He had been
concerned in several of the treaties. He warned Blount that since the
treaty of Hopewell the whites, and not the Indians, had been the
aggressors; and also warned him not to try to get too much land from the
Indians, or to take away too great an extent of their hunting grounds,
which would only help the great land companies, but to be content with
the thirty-fifth parallel for a southern boundary. [Footnote: Blount
MSS., Hawkins to Blount, March 10, 1791.] Blount paid much heed to this
advice, and by the treaty of Holston he obtained from the Indians little
more than what the tribes had previously granted; except that they
confirmed to the whites the country upon which the pioneers were already
settled. The Cumberland district had already been granted over and over
again by the Indians in special treaties, to Henderson, to the North
Carolinians and to the United States. The Creeks in particular never had
had any claim to this Cumberland country, which was a hundred miles and
over from any of their towns. All the use they had ever made of it was
to visit it with their hunting parties, as did the Cherokees, Choctaws,
Chickasaws, Shawnees, Delawares, and many others. Yet the Creeks and
other Indians had the effrontery afterwards to assert that the
Cumberland Country had never been ceded at all, and that as the settlers
in it were thus outside of the territory properly belonging to the
United States, they were not entitled to protection under the treaty
entered into with the latter.

Blount's Good Faith w