upon Occochappo or Bear Creek, below the Muscle Shoals, and there encountered the competition of other traders, who were supplied from New Orleans and Mobile.  They returned heavily laden with peltries, to Charleston, or the more northern markets, where they were sold at highly remunerating prices.  A hatchet, a pocket looking-glass, a piece of scarlet cloth, a trinket, and other articles of little value, which at Williamsburg could be bought for a few shillings, would command from an Indian hunter on the Hiwasse or Tennessee peltries amounting in value to double the number of pounds sterling.  Exchanges were necessarily slow, but the profits realized from the operation were immensely large.  In times of peace this traffic attracted the attention of many adventurous traders.  It became mutually advantageous to the Indian not less than to the white man.  The trap and the rifle, thus bartered for, procured, in one day, more game to the Cherokee hunter than his bow and arrow and his dead-fall would have secured during a month of toilsome hunting.  Other advantages resulted from it to the whites.  They became thus acquainted with the great avenues leading through the hunting grounds and to the occupied country of the neighboring tribes—­an important circumstance in the condition of either war or peace.  Further, the traders were an exact thermometer of the pacific or hostile intention and feelings of the Indians with whom they traded.  Generally, they were foreigners, most frequently Scotchmen, who had not been long in the country, or upon the frontier, who, having experienced none of the cruelties, depredation or aggressions of the Indians, cherished none of the resentment and spirit of retaliation born with, and everywhere manifested, by the American settler.  Thus, free from animosity against the aborigines, the trader was allowed to remain in the village where he traded unmolested, even when its warriors were singing the war song or brandishing the war club, preparatory to an invasion or massacre of the whites.  Timely warning was thus often given by a returning packman to a feeble and unsuspecting settlement, of the perfidy and cruelty meditated against it.

“This gainful commerce was, for a time, engrossed by the traders; but the monopoly was not allowed to continue long.  Their rapid accumulations soon excited the cupidity of another class of adventurers; and the hunter, in his turn, became a co-pioneer with the trader, in the march of civilization to the wilds of the West.  As the agricultural population approached the eastern base of the Alleghanies, the game became scarce, and was to be found by severe toil in almost inaccessible recesses and coves of the mountain.  Packmen, returning from their trading expeditions, carried with them evidences, not only of the abundance of game across the mountains, but of the facility with which it was procured.  Hunters began to accompany the traders to the Indian towns; but, unable to brook the tedious delay of procuring peltries by traffic,