30.  See the lists of signatures in the State Department MSS., also Mason’s Kaskaskia Parish Records and Law’s Vincennes.  As an example; the wife of the Chevalier Vinsenne (who gave his name to Vincennes, and afterwards fell in the battle where the Chickasaws routed the Northern French and their Indian allies), was only able to make her mark.

Clark in his letters several times mentions the “gentry,” in terms that imply their standing above the rest of the people.

31.  State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol.  III., p. 89.

32.  “Journal of Jean Baptiste Perrault,” 1783.

33.  “Voyage en Amerique” (1796), General Victor Collot, Paris, 1804, p. 318.

34. Do.  Collot calls them “un compose de traiteurs, d’aventuriers, de coureurs de bois, rameurs, et de guerriers; ignorans, superstitieux et entetes, qu’aucunes fatigues, aucunes privations, aucunes dangers ne peuvent arreter dans leurs enterprises, qu’ils mettent toujours fin; ils n’ont conserve des vertus francaises que le courage.”

CHAPTER III.

THE APPALACHIAN CONFEDERACIES, 1765-1775.

When we declared ourselves an independent nation there were on our borders three groups of Indian peoples.  The northernmost were the Iroquois or Six Nations, who dwelt in New York, and stretched down into Pennsylvania.  They had been for two centuries the terror of every other Indian tribe east of the Mississippi, as well as of the whites; but their strength had already departed.  They numbered only some ten or twelve thousand all told, and though they played a bloody part in the Revolutionary struggle, it was merely as subordinate allies of the British.  It did not lie in their power to strike a really decisive blow.  Their chastisement did not result in our gaining new territory; nor would a failure to chastise them have affected the outcome of the war nor the terms of peace.  Their fate was bound up with that of the king’s cause in America and was decided wholly by events unconnected with their own success or defeat.

The very reverse was the case with the Indians, tenfold more numerous, who lived along our western frontier.  There they were themselves our main opponents, the British simply acting as their supporters; and instead of their fate being settled by the treaty of peace with Britain, they continued an active warfare for twelve years after it had been signed.  Had they defeated us in the early years of the contest, it is more than probable that the Alleghanies would have been made our western boundary at the peace.  We won from them vast stretches of territory because we had beaten their warriors, and we could not have won it otherwise; whereas the territory of the Iroquois was lost, not because of their defeat, but because of the defeat of the British.

There were two great groups of these Indians, the ethnic corresponding roughly with the geographic division.  In the northwest, between the Ohio and the Lakes, were the Algonquin tribes, generally banded loosely together; in the southwest, between the Tennessee—­then called the Cherokee—­and the Gulf, the so-called Appalachians lived.  Between them lay a vast and beautiful region where no tribe dared dwell, but into which all ventured now and then for war and hunting.