race supplanted; of the race
outworn or overthrown. The wrongs done and suffered cannot be blinked.
Neither can they be allowed to hide the results to mankind of what has
been achieved.

It is not possible to justify the backwoodsmen by appeal to principles
which we would accept as binding on their descendants, or on the mighty
nation which has sprung up and flourished in the soil they first won and
tilled. All that can be asked is that they shall be judged as other
wilderness conquerors, as other slayers and quellers of savage peoples,
are judged. The same standards must be applied to Sevier and his
hard-faced horse-riflemen that we apply to the Greek colonist of Sicily
and the Roman colonist of the valley of the Po; to the Cossack
rough-rider who won for Russia the vast and melancholy Siberian steppes,
and to the Boer who guided his ox-drawn wagon-trains to the hot grazing
lands of the Transvaal; to the founders of Massachusetts and Virginia,
of Oregon and icy Saskatchewan; and to the men who built up those
far-off commonwealths whose coasts are lapped by the waters of the great
South Sea.

Indian Hostilities.

The aggressions by the Franklin men on the Cherokee lands bore bloody
fruit in 1786. [Footnote: State Dept. MSS. vol. ii., No. 71, Arthur
Campbell to Joseph Martin, June 16, 1786; Martin to the Governor of
Virginia, June 25, 1786, etc.] The young warriors, growing ever more
alarmed and angered at the pressure of the settlers, could not be
restrained. They shook off the control of the old men, who had seen the
tribe flogged once and again by the whites, and knew how hopeless such a
struggle was. The Chickamauga banditti watched from their eyries to
pounce upon all boats that passed down the Tennessee, and their war
bands harried the settlements far and wide, being joined in their work
by parties from the Cherokee towns proper. Stock was stolen, cabins were
burned, and settlers murdered. The stark riflemen gathered for revenge,
carrying their long rifles and riding their rough mountain horses.
Counter-inroads were carried into the Indian country. On one, when
Sevier himself led, two or three of the Indian towns were burned and a
score or so of warriors killed. As always, it proved comparatively easy
to deal a damaging blow to these southern Indians, who dwelt in
well-built log-towns; while the widely scattered, shifting,
wigwam-villages of the forest-nomads of the north rarely offered a
tangible mark at w