The Indian trade of the Virginians was not limited to the Ohio country. As in the case of Massachusetts Bay, the trade had been provided for before the colony left England,[41] and in times of need it had preserved the infant settlement. Bacon's rebellion was in part due to the opposition to the governor's trading relations with the savages. After a time the nearer Indians were exploited, and as early as the close of the seventeenth century Virginia traders sought the Indians west of the Alleghanies.[42] The Cherokees lived among the mountains, "where the present states of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas join one another."[43] To the west, on the Mississippi, were the Chickasaws, south of whom lived the Choctaws, while to the south of the Cherokees were the Creeks. The Catawbas had their villages on the border of North and South Carolina, about the headwaters of the Santee river. Shawnese Indians had formerly lived on the Cumberland river, and French traders had been among them, as well as along the Mississippi;[44] but by the time of the English traders, Tennessee and Kentucky were for the most part uninhabited. The Virginia traders reached the Catawbas, and for a time the Cherokees, by a trading route through the southwest of the colony to the Santee. By 1712 this trade was a well-established one,[45] and caravans of one hundred pack-horses passed along the trail.[46] The Carolinas had early been interested in the fur trade. In 1663 the Lords Proprietors proposed to pay the governor's salary from the proceeds of the traffic. Charleston traders were the rivals of the Virginians in the southwest. They passed even to the Choctaws and Chickasaws, crossing the rivers by portable boats of skin, and sometimes taking up a permanent abode among the Indians. Virginia and Carolina traders were not on good terms with each other, and Governor Spottswood frequently made complaints of the actions of the Carolinians. His expedition across the mountains in 1716, if his statement is to be trusted, opened a new way to the transmontane Indians, and soon afterwards a trading company was formed under his patronage to avail themselves of this new route.[47] It passed across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah valley, and down the old Indian trail to the Cherokees, who lived along the upper Tennessee. Below the bend at the Muscle Shoals the Virginians met the competition of the French traders from New Orleans and Mobile.[48] The settlement of Augusta, Georgia, was another important trading post. Here in 1740 was an English garrison of fifteen or twenty soldiers, and a little band of traders, who annually took about five hundred pack-horses into the Indian country. In the spring the furs were floated down the river in large boats.[49] The Spaniards and the French also visited the Indians, and the rivalry over this trade was an important factor in causing diplomatic embroilment.[50]