When the settlers first came to the country they found no Indians living in it, no signs of cultivation or cleared land, and nothing to show that for ages past it had been inhabited.  It was a vast plain, covered with woods and canebrakes, through which the wild herds had beaten out broad trails.  The only open places were the licks, sometimes as large as corn-fields, where the hoofs of the game had trodden the ground bare of vegetation, and channelled its surface with winding seams and gullies.  It is even doubtful if the spot of bare ground which Mansker called an “old field” or sometimes a “Chickasaw old field” was not merely one of these licks.  Buffalo, deer, and bear abounded; elk, wolves, and panthers were plentiful.

Yet there were many signs that in long by-gone times a numerous population had dwelt in the land.  Round every spring were many graves, built in a peculiar way, and covered eight or ten inches deep by mould.  In some places there were earth-covered foundations of ancient walls and embankments that enclosed spaces of eight or ten acres.  The Indians knew as little as the whites about these long-vanished mound-builders, and were utterly ignorant of the race to which they had belonged. [Footnote:  Haywood.  At present it is believed that the mound-builders were Indians.  Haywood is the authority for the early Indian wars of the Cumberland settlement, Putnam supplying some information.]

    Indian Hostilities.

For some months the whites who first arrived dwelt in peace.  But in the spring, hunting and war parties from various tribes began to harass the settlers.  Unquestionably the savages felt jealous of the white hunters, who were killing and driving away the game, precisely as they all felt jealous of one another, and for the same reason.  The Chickasaws in particular, were much irritated by the fort Clark had built at Iron Bank, on the Mississippi.  But the most powerful motive for the attacks was doubtless simply the desire for scalps and plunder.  They gathered from different quarters to assail the colonists, just as the wild beasts gathered to prey on the tame herds.

The Indians began to commit murders, kill the stock, and drive off the horses in April, and their ravages continued unceasingly throughout the year.  Among the slain was a son of Robertson, and also the unfortunate Jonathan Jennings, the man who had suffered such loss when his boat was passing the whirl of the Tennessee River.  The settlers were shot as they worked on their clearings, gathered the corn crops, or ventured outside the walls of the stockades.  Hunters were killed as they stooped to drink at the springs, or lay in wait at the licks.  They were lured up to the Indians by imitations of the gobbling of a turkey or the cries of wild beasts.  They were regularly stalked as they still-hunted the game, or were ambushed as they returned with their horses laden with meat.  The inhabitants of one station were all either killed