The Indians of the Hillabee towns, in what is now Cherokee county, sent a messenger to Jackson to sue for peace, through whom he replied that they could only have it on condition of returning prisoners and property and surrendering for punishment those who had been engaged in the massacres. But while they awaited an answer, General Cocke, working his way down the Coosa, sent a force, under General White, to attack these towns. White marched rapidly, destroying everything in his path, and on the 18th of November appeared before the principal village, which he at once fell upon, and killed sixty unresisting Indians, and carried back with him the squaws and children. The Indians, who supposed all the whites were under Jackson's command, looked upon this as a piece of treachery, and became more desperate than ever. For this unfortunate affair, General Cocke has been severely blamed; but he was tried by a court-martial, and honorably acquitted, while his own published statement makes it clear that he acted in entire good {187}faith. He was as destitute of provisions as Jackson was, and thought if he pushed on to Fort Strother it would only double the number of starving soldiers there. While Jackson was coming down from the north, General John Floyd, with nine hundred and fifty Georgians and four hundred Indians, was coming from the east. He first found the enemy at Autosse, on the Tallapoosa, thirty miles east of the present site of Montgomery, where, on the 29th of November, he attacked them, drove them from their villages to holes and caves in the river-bank, burned all their dwellings, and then hunted down and killed as many of them as possible. At least two hundred fell. The whites lost eleven killed and fifty-four wounded. General Ferdinand L. Claiborne entered the country from the west in July, and built small forts at various points. On the 12th of December he left Fort Claiborne (on the site of the present town of that name) with a thousand men, and after marching more than a hundred miles northeast, he came on the 23d to an Indian town of refuge, called Econochaca, on the Alabama, west of Montgomery. This village was built upon what the Indian prophets assured the tribe was holy ground, which no white man could set, foot upon and live. No path {188}of any kind led to it. Here the women and children had been sent for safety; here, in a little square, the prophets performed their religious rites, which are supposed to have included the burning of captives at the stake. Several captives, of both sexes, it is said were standing with the wood piled about them when Claiborne's columns appeared before the town.