Indians themselves; and at the very moment when a peace was being negotiated one side or the other would commit some brutal murder.  While the chiefs and old Indians were delivering long-winded speeches to the Peace Commissioners, bands of young braves committed horrible ravages among the lonely settlements. [Footnote:  State Dept.  MSS., No. 56, pp. 279 and 333; No. 60, p. 297, etc.] Now a drunken Indian at Fort Pitt murdered an innocent white man, the local garrison of regular troops saving him with difficulty from being lynched [Footnote:  Denny’s Journal, p. 259.]; now a band of white ruffians gathered to attack some peaceable Indians who had come in to treat [Footnote:  State Dept.  MSS., No. 56, p. 255.]; again a white man murdered an unoffending Indian, and was seized by a Federal officer, and thrown into chains, to the great indignation of his brutal companions [Footnote:  Do., No. 150, vol. ii., p. 296.]; and yet again another white man murdered an Indian, and escaped to the woods before he could be arrested. [Footnote:  Draper MSS.  Clark, Croghan, and Others to Delawares, August 28, 1785.]

    Bloodshed Begun.

Under such conditions the peace negotiations were doomed from the outset.  The truce on the border was of the most imperfect description; murders and robberies by the Indians, and acts of vindictive retaliation or aggression by the whites, occurred continually and steadily increased in number.  In 1784 a Cherokee of note, when sent to warn the intruding settlers on the French Broad that they must move out of the land, was shot and slain in a fight with a local militia captain.  Cherokee war bands had already begun to harry the frontier and infest the Kentucky Wilderness Road. [Footnote:  State Dept.  MSS., No. 48, p. 277.] At the same time the northwestern Indians likewise committed depredations, and were only prevented from making a general league against the whites by their own internal dissensions—­the Chickasaws and Kickapoos being engaged in a desperate war. [Footnote:  Do., Muehlenberg’s Letter.] The Wabash Indians were always threatening hostilities.  The Shawnees for some time observed a precarious peace, and even, in accordance with their agreement, brought in and surrendered a few white prisoners; and among the Delawares and Wyandots there was also a strong friendly party; but in all three tribes the turbulent element was never under real control, and it gradually got the upper hand.  Meanwhile the Georgians and Creeks in the south were having experiences of precisely the same kind—­treaties fraudulently procured by the whites, or fraudulently entered into and violated by the Indians; encroachments by white settlers on Indian lands, and bloody Indian forays among the peaceful settlements. [Footnote:  Do., No. 73, pp. 7, 343.  Gazette of the State of Georgia, Aug. 5, 1784, May 25, June 1, Nov. 2, Nov. 30, 1786.]