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A CENTURY OF DISHONOR.

that he would not consent to selling the lands for $1000 a year. “It would not buy a breech-clout for each of my nation;” which was literally true.

To this additional annuity the Senate consented, and with this the chiefs said they were “perfectly satisfied.” But they begged for the ploughs, hoes, cattle, etc., which had been promised in the treaty. They said, “Game is going fast away from among us. We must plant corn and raise cattle, and we want you to assist us.”

In 1794 it was necessary to make another treaty, chiefly to declare that the Holston treaty was in “full force and binding.” It had not been “fully carried into execution by reason of misunderstandings,” it was said. This was very true; white settlers had gone where they pleased, as if it did not exist; Cherokees had murdered them, as they were, by their treaty, explicitly permitted to do. The whites had retaliated by unprovoked attacks on friendly Indians, and the Indians had retaliated again. The exasperated Indians implored Congress to protect them: the still more exasperated whites demanded of Congress to protect them. The Secretary of War writes despairingly, that “The desires of too many frontier white people to seize by force or fraud on the neighboring Indian lands continues to be an unceasing cause of jealousy and hatred on the part of the Indians; and it would appear, upon a calm investigation, that until the Indians can be quieted on this point, and rely with confidence on the protection of their lands by the United States, no well-grounded hope of tranquillity can be entertained.”

In this miserable manner, unjust equally to the white men and to the Indians, affairs went on for several years, until in 1801 it became absolutely necessary that in some way a definite understanding of boundaries, and an authoritative enforcement of rights on both sides, should be brought about; accordingly, commissioners were sent by the President “to obtain the con-