the three terms in eight years
allowed by the constitution. In 1811 he was sent to Congress for the
second time, as he had represented the Territory there twenty years
earlier. He was returned again in 1813. At the conclusion of his term
in 1815 he went into the Creek country as commissioner to determine the
Creek boundaries, and here, far from his Bonnie Kate and his tribe,
he died of fever at the age of seventy. His body was buried with full
military honors at Tuckabatchee, one of the Creek towns. In 1889,
Sevier's remains were removed to Knoxville and a high marble spire was
raised above them.

His Indian enemies forgave the chastisement he had inflicted on them
and honored him. In times of peace they would come to him frequently for
advice. And in his latter days, the chiefs would make state visits
to his home on the Nolichucky River. "John Sevier is a good man"--so
declared the Cherokee, Old Tassel, making himself the spokesman of
history. Sevier had survived his old friend, co-founder with him of
Watauga, by one year. James Robertson had died in 1814 at the age of
seventy-two, among the Chickasaws, and his body, like that of his fellow
pioneer, was buried in an Indian town and lay there until 1825, when it
was removed to Nashville.

What of the red tribes who had fought these great pioneers for the wide
land of the Old Southwest and who in the end had received their dust and
treasured it with honor in the little soil remaining to them? Always the
new boundary lines drew closer in, and the red men's foothold narrowed
before the pushing tread of the whites. The day came soon when there was
no longer room for them in the land of their fathers. But far off
across the great river there was a land the white men did not covet
yet. Thither at last the tribes--Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and
Creek--took their way. With wives and children, maids and youths, the
old and the young, with all their goods, their cattle and horses, in the
company of a regiment of American troops, they--like the white men who
had superseded them--turned westward. In their faces also was the red
color of the west, but not newly there. From the beginning of their
race, Destiny had painted them with the hue of the brief hour of the
dying sun.

Chapter XI. Boone's Last Days

One spring day in 1799, there might have been observed a great stir
through the valley of the Kanawha. With the dawn, men were ahorse, and
women, too. Wagons crowded