to every foe.  Tories were numerous in the population, while there were incessant bickerings with the Creeks, frequently resulting in small local wars, brought on as often by the faithlessness and brutality of the white borderers as by the treachery and cruelty of the red.  Indeed the Indians were only kept quiet by presents, it being an unhappy feature of the frontier troubles that while lawless whites could not be prevented from encroaching on the Indian lands, the Indians, in turn could only be kept at peace with the law-abiding by being bribed.[47]

Only a small number of warriors invaded Georgia.  Nevertheless they greatly harassed the settlers, capturing several families and fighting two or three skirmishes with varying results.[48] By the middle of July Col.  Samuel Jack[49] took the field with a force of two hundred rangers, all young men, the old and infirm being left to guard the forts.  The Indians fled as soon as he had embodied his troops, and towards the end of the month he marched against one or two of their small lower towns, which he burned, destroying the grain and driving off the cattle.  No resistance was offered, and he did not lose a man.

The heaviest blow fell on South Carolina, where the Cherokees were led by Cameron himself, accompanied by most of his tories.  Some of his warriors came from the lower towns that lay along the Tugelou and Keowee, but most were from the middle towns, in the neighborhood of the Tellico, and from the valley towns that lay well to the westward of these, among the mountains, along the branches of the Hiawassee and Chattahoochee rivers.  Falling furiously on the scattered settlers, they killed them or drove them into the wooden forts, ravaging, burning, and murdering as elsewhere, and sparing neither age nor sex.  Col.  Andrew Williamson was in command of the western districts, and he at once began to gather together a force, taking his station at Picken’s Fort, with forty men, on July 3d.[50] It was with the utmost difficulty that he could get troops, guns, or ammunition; but his strenuous and unceasing efforts were successful, and his force increased day by day.  It is worth noting that these lowland troops were for the most part armed with smoothbores, unlike the rifle-bearing mountaineers.  As soon as he could muster a couple of hundred men[51] he left the fort and advanced towards the Indians, making continual halts,[52] so as to allow the numerous volunteers that were flocking to his standard to reach him.  At the same time the Americans were much encouraged by the repulse of an assault made just before daylight on one of the forts.[53] The attacking party was some two hundred strong, half of them being white men, naked and painted like the Indians; but after dark, on the evening before the attack, a band of one hundred and fifty American militia, on their way to join Williamson, entered the fort.  The assault was made before dawn; it was promptly repulsed, and at daybreak the enemy fled, having suffered some loss; thirteen of the tories were captured, but the more nimble Indians escaped.