Before the end of the Revolution the trouble between the actual settlers and the land speculators became so great that a small subsidiary civil war was threatened.  The rough riflemen resolutely declined to leave their clearings, while the titular owners appealed to the authority of the loose land laws, and wished them to be backed up by the armed force of the State. [Footnote:  See in Durrett MSS. papers relating to Isaac Shelby; letter of John Taylor to Isaac Shelby, June 8, 1782.]

The government of North Carolina was far too weak to turn out the frontiersmen in favor of the speculators to whom the land had been granted,—­often by fraudulent means, or at least for a ridiculously small sum of money.  Still less could it prevent its unruly subjects from trespassing on the Indian country, or protect them if they were themselves threatened by the savages.  It could not do justice as between its own citizens, and it was quite incompetent to preserve the peace between them and outsiders. [Footnote:  Calendar of Va.  State Papers, III., p. 213.] The borderers were left to work out their own salvation.

    Further Indian Troubles.

By the beginning of 1782 settlements were being made south of the French Broad.  This alarmed and irritated the Indians, and they sent repeated remonstrances to Major Martin, who was Indian agent, and also to the governor of North Carolina.  The latter wrote Sevier, directing him to drive off the intruding settlers, and pull down their cabins.  Sevier did not obey.  He took purely the frontier view of the question, and he had no intention of harassing his own staunch adherents for the sake of the savages whom he had so often fought.  Nevertheless, the Cherokees always liked him personally, for he was as open-handed and free-hearted to them as to every one else, and treated them to the best he had whenever they came to his house.  He had much justification for his refusal, too, in the fact that the Indians themselves were always committing outrages.  When the Americans reconquered the southern States many tories fled to the Cherokee towns, and incited the savages to hostility; and the outlying settlements of the borderers were being burned and plundered by members of the very tribes whose chiefs were at the same time writing to the governor to complain of the white encroachments. [Footnote:  Do., p. 4.]

When in April the Cherokees held a friendly talk with Evan Shelby they admitted that the tories among them and their own evil-disposed young men committed ravages on the whites, but asserted that most of them greatly desired peace, for they were weak and distressed, and had shrunk much in numbers. [Footnote:  Do., p. 171, April 29, 1782.] The trouble was that when they were so absolutely unable to control their own bad characters, it was inevitable that they should become embroiled with the whites.