ously they had made a treaty
with Sir William Johnson by which they were recognized as the owners of
all between Cumberland Mountains and the Ohio down to the Tennessee.[50]
The Cumberland River basin was the only part of this tract to which the
Cherokee had any real title, having driven out the former occupants, the
Shawnee, about 1721.[51] The Cherokee had no villages north of the
Tennessee (this probably includes the Holston as its upper part), and at
a conference at Albany the Cherokee delegates presented to the Iroquois
the skin of a deer, which they said belonged to the Iroquois, as the
animal had been killed north of the Tennessee.[52] In 1805, 1806, and
1817 they sold several tracts, mainly in middle Tennessee, north of the
Tennessee River and extending to the Cumberland River watershed, but
this territory was claimed and had been occupied by the Chickasaw, and
at one conference the Cherokee admitted their claim.[53] The adjacent
tract in northern Alabama and Georgia, on the headwaters of the Coosa,
was not permanently occupied by the Cherokee until they began to move
westward, about 1770.

[Footnote 44: Cession No. 1, on Royce's Cherokee map, 1884.]

[Footnote 45: Howe in Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, 1854, vol. 4,
p. 163.]

[Footnote 46: Cession 2, on Royce's Cherokee map, 1884.]

[Footnote 47: Howe in Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, 1854, vol. 4, pp.
155-159.]

[Footnote 48: Cession 4, on Royce's Cherokee map, 1884.]

[Footnote 49: Sir William Johnson in Parkman's Conspiracy of
Pontiac, app.]

[Footnote 50: Bancroft, Hist. U.S.]

[Footnote 51: Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee, 1853.]

[Footnote 52: Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee, 1853.]

[Footnote 53: Blount (1792) in Am. State Papers, 1832, vol. 4,
p. 336.]

The whole region of West Virginia, Kentucky, and the Cumberland River
region of Tennessee was claimed by the Iroquois and Cherokee, but the
Iroquois never occupied any of it and the Cherokee could not be said to
occupy any beyond the Cumberland Mountains. The Cumberland River was
originally held by the Shawnee, and the rest was occupied, so far as it
was occupied at all, by the Shawnee, Delaware, and occasionally by the
Wyandot and Mingo (Iroquoian), who made regular excursions southward
across the Ohio every year to hunt and to make salt at the licks. Most
of the temporary camps or villages in Kentucky and West Virginia were
built by the Shawnee and De