During this same period the settlers on the Cumberland were displaying a grim fortitude and stoical endurance in the face of Indian attack forever memorable in the history of the Old Southwest. On the night of January 15, 1781, the settlers at Freeland's Station, after a desperate resistance, succeeded in beating off the savages who attacked in force. At Nashborough on April 2d, twenty of the settlers were lured from the stockade by the artful wiles of the savages; and it was only after serious loss that they finally won their way back to the protection of the fort. Indeed, their return was due to the fierce dogs of the settlers, which were released at the most critical moment, and attacked the astounded Indians with such ferocity that the diversion thus created enabled the settlers to escape from the deadly trap. During the next two years the history of the Cumberland settlements is but the gruesome recital of murder after murder of the whites, a few at a time, by the lurking Indian foe. Robertson's dominant influence alone prevented the abandonment of the sorely harassed little stations. The arrival of the North Carolina commissioners for the purpose of laying off bounty lands and settlers' preemptions, and the treaty of peace concluded at the French Lick on November 5 and 6, 1783, gave permanence and stability to the Cumberland settlements. The lasting friendship of the Chickasaws was won; but the Creeks for some time continued to harass the Tennessee pioneers. The frontiersmen's most formidable foe, the Cherokees, stoically, heroically fighting the whites in the field, and smallpox, syphilis, and drunkenness at home, at last abandoned the unequal battle. The treaty at Hopewell on November 28, 1785, marks the end of an era--the Spartan yet hopeless resistance of the intrepid red men to the relentless and frequently unwarranted expropriation by the whites of the ancient and immemorial domain of the savage.