"It was this conquest that gave to the powerful Iroquois all the title they ever acquired to Kentucky. At the peace of Ryswick, in 1697, their right to their western conquests was fully acknowledged; and at the treaty of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, in 1744, they ceded to Virginia all their lands west of that colony. In 1752, the Shawanoes and other western tribes, at Logstown on the Ohio, confirmed the Lancaster treaty, and sold their claim to the country south of the Ohio; and, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, in 1768, the Six Nations made a new cession of their claim to Kentucky as low as the Cherokee or Tennessee River. Up to this period, the Cherokees never so much as thought of contesting with the Iroquois their claim to the Kentucky country; for some of the visiting Cherokees, while on their route to attend the Fort Stanwix treaty, killed game for their subsistence, and on their arrival at Fort Stanwix, tendered the skins to the Six Nations, saying, 'They are yours, we killed them after passing the Big River,' the name by which they had always designated the Tennessee. But probably discovering that other Indian nations were driving a good business by disposing of their distant land rights, the Cherokees managed to hatch up some sort of claim, which they, in part, relinquished to Virginia, at the treaty of Lochaber in 1770; and when Col. Donelson ran the line the following year, the boundary was fixed, at the suggestion of the Cherokee deputies, on the Kentucky River as the south-western line, as they delighted, they said, in natural landmarks. This considerably enlarged the cession, for which they received an additional compensation. "In 1772, the Shawanoes made no claim to Kentucky; and at the treaty of Camp Charlotte, in October, 1774, they tacitly confirmed their old sale of that country in 1752, by agreeing not even to hunt south of the Ohio. Thus, then, we see that the Iroquois had twice ceded their right to Kentucky as low as the Tennessee River, and twice received their pay; the Shawanoes had disposed of their claim, such as it was, and received for it a valuable consideration; and the Cherokees, finding it profitable to lay claim to some valuable unoccupied region, sold their newly assumed right to the country south and east of Kentucky River. Their claim, if indeed it rises to the dignity of a claim, south and west of the Kentucky, was fairly purchased by Henderson and Company, and thus with the subsequent purchase by treaty, of the Chickasaws, of the strip between the Tennessee and Mississippi, the Indian title to the whole Kentucky country was fully and fairly extinguished."--R. G. T.