cceptance of fate.

The letter then goes on to express the opinion that, if Congress does
not take action to bring about a peace, the Creeks will undoubtedly
invade Georgia with some five thousand warriors, for McGillivray has
announced that he will consent to settle the boundary question with
Congress, but will do nothing with Georgia. The letter shows with rather
startling clearness how little Robertson regarded the Cumberland people
and the Georgians as being both in the same nation; he saw nothing
strange in one portion of the country concluding a firm peace with an
enemy who was about to devastate another portion.

Robertson was anxious to encourage immigration, and for this purpose he
had done his best to hurry forward the construction of a road between
the Holston and the Cumberland settlements. In his letter to Martin he
urged him to proclaim to possible settlers the likelihood of peace, and
guaranteed that the road would be ready before winter. It was opened in
the fall; and parties of settlers began to come in over it. To protect
them, the district from time to time raised strong guards of mounted
riflemen to patrol the road, as well as the neighborhood of the
settlements, and to convoy the immigrant companies. To defray the
expenses of the troops, the Cumberland court raised taxes. Exactly as
the Franklin people had taken peltries as the basis for their currency,
so those of the Cumberland, in arranging for payment in kind, chose the
necessaries of life as the best medium of exchange. They enacted that
the tax should be paid one quarter in corn, one half in beef, pork, bear
meat, and venison, one eighth in salt, and one eighth in money.
[Footnote: Ramsey, p. 504.] It was still as easy to shoot bear and deer
as to raise hogs and oxen.

McGillivray's Letter to Robertson.

Robertson wrote several times to McGillivray, alone or in conjunction
with another veteran frontier leader, Col. Anthony Bledsoe. Various
other men of note on the border, both from Virginia and North Carolina,
wrote likewise. To these letters McGillivray responded promptly in a
style rather more polished though less frank than that of his
correspondents. His tone was distinctly more warlike and less
conciliatory than theirs. He avowed, without hesitation, that the Creeks
and not the Americans had been the original aggressors, saying that "my
nation has waged war against your people for several years past; but
that we had no motive of r