The Winning of the West, Volume Four | Page 6

the year 1791. For seven years
the Federal authorities had been vainly endeavoring to make some final
settlement of the question by entering into treaties with the
Northwestern and Southwestern tribes. In the earlier treaties the
delegates from the Continental Congress asserted that the United States
were invested with the fee of all the land claimed by the Indians. In the
later treaties the Indian proprietorship of the lands was conceded.
[Footnote: American State Papers, Vol. IV., Indian Affairs, I., p. 13.
Letter of H. Knox, June 15, 1789. This is the lettering on the back of
the volume, and for convenience it will be used in referring to it.] This
concession at the time seemed important to the whites; but the Indians
probably never understood that there had been any change of attitude;
nor did it make any practical difference, for, whatever the theory might
be, the lands had eventually to be won, partly by whipping the savages
in fight, partly by making it better worth their while to remain at peace
than to go to war.
Knox and the Treaties.
The Federal officials under whose authority these treaties were made
had no idea of the complexity of the problem. In 1789 the Secretary of
War, the New Englander Knox, solemnly reported to the President that,
if the treaties were only observed and the Indians conciliated, they
would become attached to the United States, and the expense of
managing them, for the next half-century, would be only some fifteen
thousand dollars a year. [Footnote: American State Papers, Vol. IV.,

Indian Affairs, I., p. 13.] He probably represented, not unfairly, the
ordinary Eastern view of the matter. He had not the slightest idea of the
rate at which the settlements were increasing, though he expected that
tracts of Indian territory would from time to time be acquired. He made
no allowance for a growth so rapid that within the half-century six or
eight populous States were to stand within the Indian-owned wilderness
of his day. He utterly failed to grasp the central features of the situation,
which were that the settlers needed the land, and were bound to have it,
within a few years; and that the Indians would not give it up, under no
matter what treaty, without an appeal to arms.
Treaties with the Southern Indians.
In the South the United States Commissioners, in endeavoring to
conclude treaties with the Creeks and Cherokees, had been continually
hampered by the attitude of Georgia and the Franklin frontiersmen. The
Franklin men made war and peace with the Cherokees just as they
chose, and utterly refused to be bound by the treaties concluded on
behalf of the United States. Georgia played the same part with regard to
the Creeks. The Georgian authorities paid no heed whatever to the
desires of Congress, and negotiated on their own account a series of
treaties with the Creeks at Augusta, Galphinton, and Shoulder-bone, in
1783, 1785, and 1786. But these treaties amounted to nothing, for
nobody could tell exactly which towns or tribes owned a given tract of
land, or what individuals were competent to speak for the Indians as a
whole; the Creeks and Cherokees went through the form of
surrendering the same territory on the Oconee. [Footnote: American
State Papers, IV., 15. Letter of Knox, July 6, 1789.] The Georgians
knew that the Indians with whom they treated had no power to
surrender the lands; but all they wished was some shadowy color of
title, that might serve as an excuse for their seizing the coveted territory.
On the other hand the Creeks, loudly though they declaimed against the
methods of the Georgian treaty-makers, themselves shamelessly
disregarded the solemn engagements which their authorized
representatives made with the United States. Moreover their murderous
forays on the Georgian settlers were often as unprovoked as were the
aggressions of the brutal Georgia borderers.
Mutual Wrongs of the Creeks and the Borderers.
The Creeks were prompt to seize every advantage given by the

impossibility of defining the rights of the various component parts of
their loosely knit confederacy. They claimed or disclaimed
responsibility as best suited their plans for the moment. When at
Galphinton two of the Creek towns signed away a large tract of
territory, McGillivray, the famous half-breed, and the other chiefs,
loudly protested that the land belonged to the whole confederacy, and
that the separate towns could do nothing save by consent of all. But in
May, 1787, a party of Creeks from the upper towns made an
unprovoked foray into Georgia, killed two settlers, and carried off a
negro and fourteen horses; the militia who followed them attacked the
first Indians they fell in with, who happened to be from the lower towns,
and killed twelve; whereupon the same chiefs disavowed all
responsibility for the