As for the Cherokees, they had not confined themselves to sending the war belt to the northwestern tribes, while professing friendship for the Americans; they had continued in close communication with the British Indian agents, assuring them that their peace negotiations were only shams, intended to blind the settlers, and that they would be soon ready to take up the hatchet. [Footnote: _Do_., No. 71, Vol. II., p. 189. Letter of David Tait to Oconostota. "I believe what you say about telling lies to the Virginians to be very right."] This time Cameron himself marched into the Cherokee country with his company of fifty tories, brutal outlaws, accustomed to savage warfare, and ready to take part in the worst Indian outrages. [Footnote: _Do_., No. 51, Vol. II. Letter of the three agents. "The Cherokees are now exceedingly well disposed. Mr. Cameron is now among them ... Captain Cameron has his company of Loyal Refugees with him, who are well qualified for the service they are engaged in.... He carried up with him a considerable quantity of presents and ammunition which are absolutely necessary to engage the Indians to go upon service."] The ensuing Cherokee war was due not to the misdeeds of the settlers--though doubtless a few lawless whites occasionally did wrong to their red neighbors--but to the short-sighted treachery and ferocity of the savages themselves, and especially to the machinations of the tories and British agents. The latter unceasingly incited the Indians to ravage the frontier with torch and scalping knife. They deliberately made the deeds of the torturers and women-killers their own, and this they did with the approbation of the British Government, and to its merited and lasting shame. Yet by the end of 1779 the inrush of settlers to the Holston regions had been so great that, as with Kentucky, there was never any real danger after this year that the whites would be driven from the land by the red tribes whose hunting-ground it once had been. CHAPTER IX. KING'S MOUNTAIN, 1780. The British in the Southern States.