- saws, and Cherokees, who resided far south of it, but who
had been accustomed to consider it as their exclusive property {126} for hunting in, from time immemorial. Battles with various success were generally the consequence of those meetings. The southern Indians were the most numerous—the northern the most warlike.
Finding that they exhausted each other to no purpose, by such constant hostility, necessity at last obliged them to make a peace, the basis of which was, that the hunting country should be common to both as such, to the exclusion of all other people, and that neither would ever settle on it themselves, nor permit others to do so.
They enjoyed in quiet the uninterrupted use of this immense common forest, for many years after; but the Virginians having extended their settlements to the westward of the mountains, the frontier inhabitants, who, like the aborigines, supported themselves principally by hunting, were led in quest of game, as far west as the banks of Kentucky river, in the very centre of the Indian hunting country.
On their return to their settlements, the report spread from them to the colonial government, that they had discovered a country most abundant in game, and far exceeding in natural fertility any of the settled parts of Virginia.
Small armed parties were sent out to establish blockhouses for the protection of hunters or settlers, while the lands were divided into tracts and granted or sold to proprietors, as suited the convenience of the government.
The Indians, indignant at being followed to so remote a part of the continent, after the great sacrifice to peace before made by them in the abandonment of their native country, did their utmost to repel the invaders. The northern tribes were the most ferocious and the most exasperated, and sometimes alone, and sometimes aided by their southern auxiliaries, carried on a most bloody and
