Robertson was anxious to encourage immigration, and for this purpose he had done his best to hurry forward the construction of a road between the Holston and the Cumberland settlements.  In his letter to Martin he urged him to proclaim to possible settlers the likelihood of peace, and guaranteed that the road would be ready before winter.  It was opened in the fall; and parties of settlers began to come in over it.  To protect them, the district from time to time raised strong guards of mounted riflemen to patrol the road, as well as the neighborhood of the settlements, and to convoy the immigrant companies.  To defray the expenses of the troops, the Cumberland court raised taxes.  Exactly as the Franklin people had taken peltries as the basis for their currency, so those of the Cumberland, in arranging for payment in kind, chose the necessaries of life as the best medium of exchange.  They enacted that the tax should be paid one quarter in corn, one half in beef, pork, bear meat, and venison, one eighth in salt, and one eighth in money. [Footnote:  Ramsey, p. 504.] It was still as easy to shoot bear and deer as to raise hogs and oxen.

    McGillivray’s Letter to Robertson.

Robertson wrote several times to McGillivray, alone or in conjunction with another veteran frontier leader, Col.  Anthony Bledsoe.  Various other men of note on the border, both from Virginia and North Carolina, wrote likewise.  To these letters McGillivray responded promptly in a style rather more polished though less frank than that of his correspondents.  His tone was distinctly more warlike and less conciliatory than theirs.  He avowed, without hesitation, that the Creeks and not the Americans had been the original aggressors, saying that “my nation has waged war against your people for several years past; but that we had no motive of revenge, nor did it proceed from any sense of injuries sustained from your people, but being warmly attached to the British and being under their influence our operations were directed by them against you in common with other Americans.”  He then acknowledged that after the close of the war the Americans had sent overtures of peace, which he had accepted—­although as a matter of fact the Creeks never ceased their ravages,—­but complained that Robertson’s expedition against the Muscle Shoals again brought on war. [Footnote:  State Department MSS., No. 71, vol. ii., p. 620.  McGillivray to Bledsoe and Robertson; no date.]

There was, of course, nothing in this complaint of the injustice of Robertson’s expedition, for the Muscle Shoal Indians had been constantly plundering and murdering before it was planned, and it was undertaken merely to put a stop to their ravages.  However, McGillivray made adroit use of it.  He stated that the expedition itself, carried on, as he understood it, mainly against the French traders, “was no concern of ours and would have been entirely disregarded by us; but in the execution of it some of our people