All the country of the Overhill Cherokees was laid waste, a thousand cabins were burned, and fifty thousand bushels of corn destroyed.  Twenty-nine warriors in all were killed, and seventeen women and children captured, not including the family of Nancy Ward, who were treated as friends, not prisoners.  But one white man was killed and two wounded. [Footnote:  Campbell MSS.  Arthur Campbell’s official report.  The figures of the cabins and corn destroyed are probably exaggerated.  All the Tennessee historians, down to Phelan, are hopelessly in the dark over this campaign.  Haywood actually duplicates it (pp. 63 and 99) recounting it first as occurring in ’79, and then with widely changed incidents as happening in ’8l—­making two expeditions.  When he falls into such a tremendous initial error, it is not to be wondered at that the details he gives are very untrustworthy.  Ramsey corrects Haywood as far as the two separate expeditions are concerned, but he makes a number of reckless statements apparently on no better authority than the traditions current among the border people, sixty or seventy years after the event.  These stand on the same foundation with the baseless tale that makes Isaac Shelby take part in the battle of Island Flats.  The Tennessee historians treat Sevier as being the chief commander; but he was certainly under Campbell; the address they sent out to the Indians is signed by Campbell first, Sevier second, and Martin third.  Haywood, followed by Ramsey, says that Sevier marched to the Chickamauga towns, which he destroyed, and then marched down the Coosa to the region of the Cypress Swamps.  But Campbell’s official report says that the towns “in the neighborhood of Chickamauga and the Town of Cologn, situated on the sources of the Mobile” were not destroyed, nor visited, and he carefully enumerates all the towns that the troops burned and the regions they went through.  They did not go near Chickamauga nor the Coosa.  Unless there is some documentary evidence in favor of the assertions of Haywood and Ramsey they cannot for a moment be taken against the explicit declaration of the official report.

Mr. Kirke merely follows Ramsey, and adds a few flourishes of his own, such as that at the Chickamauga towns “the blood of the slaughtered cattle dyed red the Tennessee” for some twenty miles, and that “the homes of over forty thousand people were laid in ashes.”  This last estimate is just about ten times too strong, for the only country visited was that of the Overhill Cherokees, and the outside limit for the population of the devastated territory would be some four thousand souls, or a third of the Cherokee tribe, which all told numbered perhaps twelve thousand people.]

In the burnt towns, and on the dead warriors, were found many letters and proclamations from the British agents and commanders, showing that almost every chief in the nation had been carrying on a double game; for the letters covered the periods at which they had been treating with the Americans and earnestly professing their friendship for the latter and their determination to be neutral in the contest then waging.  As Campbell wrote in his report to the Virginian governor, no people had ever acted with more foolish duplicity.