allotted, and hundreds of
homes had been built on the lands thus won by the whites or ceded by the
Indians. As with all Indian treaties, it was next to impossible to say
exactly how far these agreements were binding, because no persons, not
even the Indians themselves, could tell exactly who had authority to
represent the tribes. [Footnote: American State Papers, Public Lands,
I., p. 40, vi.] The Commissioners paid little heed to these treaties,
and drew the boundary so that quantities of land which had been entered
under regular grants, and were covered by the homesteads of the
frontiersmen, were declared to fall within the Cherokee line. Moreover,
they even undertook to drive all settlers off these lands.

Of course, such a treaty excited the bitter anger of the frontiersmen,
and they scornfully refused to obey its provisions. They hated the
Indians, and, as a rule, were brutally indifferent to their rights,
while they looked down on the Federal Government as impotent. Nor was
the ill-will to the treaty confined to the rough borderers. Many men of
means found that land grants which they had obtained in good faith and
for good money were declared void. Not only did they denounce the
treaty, and decline to abide by it, but they denounced the motives of
the Commissioners, declaring, seemingly without justification, that they
had ingratiated themselves with the Indians to further land speculations
of their own. [Footnote: Clay MSS. Jesse Benton to Thos. Hart, April 3,
1786.]

Violation of the Treaty.

As the settlers declined to pay any heed to the treaty the Indians
naturally became as discontented with it as the whites. In the following
summer the Cherokee chiefs made solemn complaint that, instead of
retiring from the disputed ground, the settlers had encroached yet
farther upon it, and had come to within five miles of the beloved town
of Chota. The chiefs added that they had now made several such treaties,
each of which established boundaries that were immediately broken, and
that indeed it had been their experience that after a treaty the whites
settled even faster on their lands than before. [Footnote: State
Department MSS., No. 56. Address of Corn Tassel and Hanging Maw, Sept.
5, 1786.] Just before this complaint was sent to Congress the same
chiefs had been engaged in negotiations with the settlers themselves,
who advanced radically different claims. The fact was that in this
unsettled time the bond of Gove