The land system of the United States was at first a bad one, intended to secure immediate revenue from the sale of immense pieces at auction, on long credit, at very few points, the land to find its way into the hands of actual settlers only through mercenary speculators. The honest pioneer was therefore at the mercy of these land-sharks, greedy and unpatriotic in the extreme. The western movement aroused the Indians, of whom there were, in 1790, from 20,000 to 40,000 north of the Ohio. The idea of amalgamating or even civilizing these people had long been practically given up. Settlers agreed in denouncing them as treacherous, intractable, bloodthirsty, and faithless. So incessant and terrific were their onslaughts, the Ohio Valley had come to be known as "the dark and bloody ground." The British, still occupying the western posts, used their influence to keep up and intensify Indian hostility to the United States settlers and Government. In September, 1790, Governor St. Clair sent Harmar against the Indians on the Miami and Maumee. He had about fifteen hundred men, two-thirds of them militia. The expedition was ill-managed from the first, and, after advancing as far as the present Fort Wayne, came back with great loss to itself, having exasperated rather than injured the red men. Harmar, chagrined, soon resigned. The Indians south of the Ohio were perhaps twice as numerous as those north, and partly civilized. The Chickasaws and Choctaws, nearest the Mississippi, gave little trouble. Not so the Cherokees and Creeks, whose seats were nearer the whites. The Creeks claimed parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, justified herein by acts of the Continental Congress. However, the whites invaded this territory, provoking a fierce war, wherein the Cherokees allied themselves with the Creeks of Alabama and Georgia. This brave tribe had border troubles of its own with Georgia. These various hordes of savages, having the Florida Spaniards to back them with counsel, arms, and ammunition, were a formidable foe, which might have annihilated Georgia but for aid from the general Government. McGillivray, the half-breed chief of the Creeks, was enticed to New York, where the kindness of Washington and the evident desire of Congress to deal with his people fairly, resulted in a treaty, August 13, 1790, which secured peace to the Southwest for a long time. [1791] Touching the northwestern redskins, Harmar's defeat had convinced Washington that mild measures were not yet the thing. A larger force was fitted out against them under St. Clair in person, whom, as an old Revolutionary comrade, Washington still trusted. General Butler was second in command. The two thousand regulars and one thousand militia rendezvoused at Cincinnati in the autumn of 1791. Part object of the expedition was to build a military road, with forts at intervals, all the way to the upper Wabash. Progress was therefore slow.