Its Gradual Change of Tone.

Gradually, however, the tone of the paper changed, as did the tone of the community, at least to the extent of becoming Democratic and anti-Federal; for the people felt that the Easterners did not sympathize with them either in their contests with the Indians or in their desire to control the Mississippi and the farther West.  They grew to regard with particular vindictiveness the Federalists,—­the aristocrats, as they styled them,—­of the Southern seaboard States, notably of Virginia and South Carolina.

One pathetic feature of the paper was the recurrence of advertisements by persons whose friends and kinsfolk had been carried off by the Indians, and who anxiously sought any trace of them.

    Queer Use of the “Gazette.”

But the Gazette was used for the expression of opinions not only by the whites, but occasionally even by an Indian.  One of the Cherokee chiefs, the Red Bird, put into the Gazette, for two buckskins, a talk to the Cherokee chief of the Upper Towns, in which he especially warned him to leave alone one William Cocke, “the white man who lived among the mulberry trees,” for, said Red Bird, “the mulberry man talks very strong and runs very fast”; this same Cocke being afterwards one of the first two senators from Tennessee.  The Red Bird ended his letter by the expression of the rather quaint wish, “that all the bad people on both sides were laid in the ground, for then there would not be so many mush men trying to make people to believe they were warriors.” [Footnote:  Knoxville Gazette, November 3, 1792.]

    Efforts to Promote Higher Education.

Blount brought his family to Tennessee at once, and took the lead in trying to build up institutions for higher education.  After a good deal of difficulty an academy was organized under the title of Blount College, and was opened as soon as a sufficient number of pupils could be gotten together; there were already two other colleges in the Territory, Greeneville and Washington, the latter being the academy founded by Doak.  Like almost all other institutions of learning of the day these three were under clerical control; but Blount College was chartered as a non-denomination institution, the first of its kind in the United States. [Footnote:  See Edward T. Sanford’s “Blount College and the University of Tennessee,” p. 13.] The clergyman and the lawyer, with the school-master, were still the typical men of letters in all the frontier communities.  The doctor was not yet a prominent feature of life in the backwoods, though there is in the Gazette an advertisement of one who announces that he intends to come to practise “with a large stock of genuine medicines.” [Footnote:  Knoxville Gazette, June 19, 1794.]

    Books of the Backwoods.