The Winning of the West, Volume 4: Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807Roosevelt, Theodore
History
The Winning of the West, Volume 4: Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807
Roosevelt, Theodore
Northwest, Old -- History; United States -- Territorial expansion; West (U.S.) -- History
The Indians were even more fond of horse-stealing than of murder, and
they found a ready market for their horses not only in their own nations
and among the Spaniards, but among the American frontiersmen themselves.
Many of the unscrupulous white scoundrels who lived on the borders of
the Indian country made a regular practice of receiving the stolen
horses. As soon as a horse was driven from the Tennessee or Cumberland
it was hurried through the Indian country to the Carolina or Georgia
frontiers, where the red thieves delivered it to the foul white
receivers, who took it to some town on the seaboard, so as effectually
to prevent a recovery. At Swannanoa in North Carolina, among the lawless
settlements at the foot of the Oconee Mountain in South Carolina, and at
Tugaloo in Georgia, there were regular markets for these stolen horses.
[Footnote: Blount to the Secretary of War, May 5, 1792, and Nov. 10,
1794. As before, I use the word "Tennessee" instead of "Southwestern
Territory" for convenience; it was not regularly employed until 1796.]
There were then, and continued to exist as long as the frontier lasted,
plenty of white men who, though ready enough to wrong the Indians, were
equally ready to profit by the wrongs they inflicted on the white
settlers, and to encourage their misdeeds if profit was thereby to be
made. Very little evildoing of this kind took place Tennessee, for
Blount, backed by Sevier and Robertson, was vigilant to put it down; but
as yet the Federal Government was not firm in its seat, and its arm was
not long enough to reach into the remote frontier districts, where
lawlessness of every kind throve, and the whites wronged one another as
recklessly as they wronged the Indians.
Sufferings of the Honest Settlers.
Blount's Efforts to Prevent Brutality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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