a towns did
most harm according to their power. Sometimes the bands that entered the
settlements were several hundred strong; but their chief object was
plunder, and they rarely attacked the strong places of the white
frontiersmen, though they forced them to keep huddled in the stockaded
stations; nor did they often fight a pitched battle with the larger
bodies of militia. There is no reason for reciting in full the countless
deeds of rapine and murder. The incidents, though with infinite variety
of detail, were in substance the same as in all the Indian wars of the
backwoods. Men, women, and children were killed or captured; outlying
cabins were attacked and burned; the husbandman was shot as he worked in
the field, and the housewife as she went for water. The victim was now a
militiaman on his way to join his company, now one of a party of
immigrants, now a settler on his lonely farm, and now a justice of the
peace going to Court, or a Baptist preacher striving to reach the
Cumberland country that he might preach the word of God to the people
who had among them no religious instructor. The express messengers and
post riders, who went through the wilderness from one commander to the
other, always rode at hazard of their lives. In one of Blount's letters
to Robertson he remarks: "Your letter of the 6th of February sent
express by James Russell was handed to me, much stained with his blood,
by Mr. Shannon, who accompanied him." Russell had been wounded in an
ambuscade, and his fifty dollars were dearly earned. [Footnote:
Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, March 8, 1794. The files of the
_Knoxville Gazette_ are full of details of these outrages, and so are
the letters of Blount to the Secretary of War given in the American
State Papers, as well as the letters of Blount and Robertson in the two
bound volumes of Robertson MSS. Many of them are quoted in more
accessible form in Haywood.]

Horse-stealing.
Brutal White Ruffians.

The Indians were even more fond of horse-stealing than of murder, and
they found a ready market for their horses not only in their own nations
and among the Spaniards, but among the American frontiersmen themselves.
Many of the unscrupulous white scoundrels who lived on the borders of
the Indian country made a regular practice of receiving the stolen
horses. As soon as a horse was driven from the Tennessee or Cumberland
it was hurried through the Indian country to the Carolina or Georgia
fron