It is not possible to justify the backwoodsmen by appeal to principles which we would accept as binding on their descendants, or on the mighty nation which has sprung up and flourished in the soil they first won and tilled.  All that can be asked is that they shall be judged as other wilderness conquerors, as other slayers and quellers of savage peoples, are judged.  The same standards must be applied to Sevier and his hard-faced horse-riflemen that we apply to the Greek colonist of Sicily and the Roman colonist of the valley of the Po; to the Cossack rough-rider who won for Russia the vast and melancholy Siberian steppes, and to the Boer who guided his ox-drawn wagon-trains to the hot grazing lands of the Transvaal; to the founders of Massachusetts and Virginia, of Oregon and icy Saskatchewan; and to the men who built up those far-off commonwealths whose coasts are lapped by the waters of the great South Sea.

    Indian Hostilities.

The aggressions by the Franklin men on the Cherokee lands bore bloody fruit in 1786. [Footnote:  State Dept.  MSS. vol. ii., No. 71, Arthur Campbell to Joseph Martin, June 16, 1786; Martin to the Governor of Virginia, June 25, 1786, etc.] The young warriors, growing ever more alarmed and angered at the pressure of the settlers, could not be restrained.  They shook off the control of the old men, who had seen the tribe flogged once and again by the whites, and knew how hopeless such a struggle was.  The Chickamauga banditti watched from their eyries to pounce upon all boats that passed down the Tennessee, and their war bands harried the settlements far and wide, being joined in their work by parties from the Cherokee towns proper.  Stock was stolen, cabins were burned, and settlers murdered.  The stark riflemen gathered for revenge, carrying their long rifles and riding their rough mountain horses.  Counter-inroads were carried into the Indian country.  On one, when Sevier himself led, two or three of the Indian towns were burned and a score or so of warriors killed.  As always, it proved comparatively easy to deal a damaging blow to these southern Indians, who dwelt in well-built log-towns; while the widely scattered, shifting, wigwam-villages of the forest-nomads of the north rarely offered a tangible mark at which to strike.  Of course, the retaliatory blows of the whites, like the strokes of the Indians, fell as often on the innocent as on the guilty.  During this summer, to revenge the death of a couple of settlers, a backwoods Colonel, with the appropriate name of Outlaw, fell on a friendly Cherokee town and killed two or three Indians, besides plundering a white man, a North Carolina trader, who happened to be in the town.  Nevertheless, throughout 1786 the great majority of the Cherokees remained quiet. [Footnote:  Va.  State Papers, IV., pp. 162, 164, 176.]