Of course, such a treaty excited the bitter anger of the frontiersmen, and they scornfully refused to obey its provisions.  They hated the Indians, and, as a rule, were brutally indifferent to their rights, while they looked down on the Federal Government as impotent.  Nor was the ill-will to the treaty confined to the rough borderers.  Many men of means found that land grants which they had obtained in good faith and for good money were declared void.  Not only did they denounce the treaty, and decline to abide by it, but they denounced the motives of the Commissioners, declaring, seemingly without justification, that they had ingratiated themselves with the Indians to further land speculations of their own. [Footnote:  Clay MSS.  Jesse Benton to Thos.  Hart, April 3, 1786.]

    Violation of the Treaty.

As the settlers declined to pay any heed to the treaty the Indians naturally became as discontented with it as the whites.  In the following summer the Cherokee chiefs made solemn complaint that, instead of retiring from the disputed ground, the settlers had encroached yet farther upon it, and had come to within five miles of the beloved town of Chota.  The chiefs added that they had now made several such treaties, each of which established boundaries that were immediately broken, and that indeed it had been their experience that after a treaty the whites settled even faster on their lands than before. [Footnote:  State Department MSS., No. 56.  Address of Corn Tassel and Hanging Maw, Sept. 5, 1786.] Just before this complaint was sent to Congress the same chiefs had been engaged in negotiations with the settlers themselves, who advanced radically different claims.  The fact was that in this unsettled time the bond of Governmental authority was almost as lax among the whites as among the Indians, and the leaders on each side who wished for peace were hopelessly unable to restrain their fellows who did not.  Under such circumstances, the sword, or rather the tomahawk, was ultimately the only possible arbiter.

    Treaties with Northwestern Indians.

The treaties entered into with the northwestern Indians failed for precisely the opposite reason.  The treaty at Hopewell promised so much to the Indians that the whites refused to abide by its terms.  In the councils on the Ohio the Americans promised no more than they could and did perform; but the Indians themselves broke the treaties at once, and in all probability never for a moment intended to keep them, merely signing from a greedy desire to get the goods they were given as an earnest.  They were especially anxious for spirits, for they far surpassed even the white borderers in their crazy thirst for strong drink.  “We have smelled your liquor and it is very good; we hope you will give us some little kegs to carry home,” said the spokesmen of a party of Chippewas, who had come from the upper Great Lakes. [Footnote:  Do., Letters of H. Knox, No. 150, vol. i., p.