No. 51, Vol.  II.  Letter of the three agents.  “The Cherokees are now exceedingly well disposed.  Mr. Cameron is now among them ...  Captain Cameron has his company of Loyal Refugees with him, who are well qualified for the service they are engaged in....  He carried up with him a considerable quantity of presents and ammunition which are absolutely necessary to engage the Indians to go upon service.”] The ensuing Cherokee war was due not to the misdeeds of the settlers—­though doubtless a few lawless whites occasionally did wrong to their red neighbors—­but to the short-sighted treachery and ferocity of the savages themselves, and especially to the machinations of the tories and British agents.  The latter unceasingly incited the Indians to ravage the frontier with torch and scalping knife.  They deliberately made the deeds of the torturers and women-killers their own, and this they did with the approbation of the British Government, and to its merited and lasting shame.

Yet by the end of 1779 the inrush of settlers to the Holston regions had been so great that, as with Kentucky, there was never any real danger after this year that the whites would be driven from the land by the red tribes whose hunting-ground it once had been.

CHAPTER IX.

KING’S MOUNTAIN, 1780.

    The British in the Southern States.

During the Revolutionary war the men of the west for the most part took no share in the actual campaigning against the British and Hessians.  Their duty was to conquer and hold the wooded wilderness that stretched westward to the Mississippi; and to lay therein the foundations of many future commonwealths.  Yet at a crisis in the great struggle for liberty, at one of the darkest hours for the patriot cause, it was given to a band of western men to come to the relief of their brethren of the seaboard and to strike a telling and decisive blow for all America.  When the three southern provinces lay crushed and helpless at the feet of Cornwallis, the Holston backwoodsmen suddenly gathered to assail the triumphant conqueror.  Crossing the mountains that divided them from the beaten and despairing people of the tidewater region, they killed the ablest lieutenant of the British commander, and at a single stroke undid all that he had done.

By the end of 1779 the British had reconquered Georgia.  In May, 1780, they captured Charleston, speedily reduced all South Carolina to submission, and then marched into the old North State.  Cornwallis, much the ablest of the British generals, was in command over a mixed force of British, Hessian, and loyal American regulars, aided by Irish volunteers and bodies of refugees from Florida.  In addition, the friends to the king’s cause, who were very numerous in the southernmost States, rose at once on the news of the British successes, and thronged to the royal standards; so that a number of regiments of tory militia were soon embodied.  McGillivray, the Creek chief, sent bands of his warriors to assist the British and tories on the frontier, and the Cherokees likewise came to their help.  The patriots for the moment abandoned hope, and bowed before their victorious foes.