by the running of the frightened cattle, and when the sentinel fired at the assailants they were not ten yards from the gate of the blockhouse.  The barred door withstood the shock and the flame-flashes lit up the night as the gun-men fired through the loop-holes.  The Indians tried to burn the fort, one of the chiefs, a half-breed, leaping on the roof; he was shot through the thigh and rolled off; but he stayed close to the logs trying to light them with his torch, alternately blowing it into a blaze and halloing to the Indians to keep on with the attack.  However, he was slain, as was the Shawnee head chief, and several warriors, while John Watts, leader of the expedition, was shot through both thighs.  The log walls of the grim little blockhouse stood out black in the fitful glare of the cane torches; and tongues of red fire streamed into the night as the rifles rang.  The attack had failed, and the throng of dark, flitting forms faded into the gloom as the baffled Indians retreated.  So disheartened were they by the check, and by the loss they had suffered, that they did not further molest the settlements, but fell back to their strongholds across the Tennessee.  Among the Cherokee chiefs who led the raid were two signers of the treaty of Holston. [Footnote:  Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Oct. 17, 1792; Knoxville Gazette, Oct. 10, and Oct. 20, 1792; Brown’s Narrative, in Southwestern Monthly.]

    Monotony of the Indian Outrages.

After this the war was open, so far as the Indians of the Lower Cherokee Towns and of many of the Creek Towns were concerned; but the whites were still restrained by strict orders from the United States authorities, who refused to allow them to retaliate.  Outrage followed outrage in monotonously bloody succession.  The Creeks were the worst offenders in point of numbers, but the Lower Cherokees from the Chickamauga towns did most harm according to their power.  Sometimes the bands that entered the settlements were several hundred strong; but their chief object was plunder, and they rarely attacked the strong places of the white frontiersmen, though they forced them to keep huddled in the stockaded stations; nor did they often fight a pitched battle with the larger bodies of militia.  There is no reason for reciting in full the countless deeds of rapine and murder.  The incidents, though with infinite variety of detail, were in substance the same as in all the Indian wars of the backwoods.  Men, women, and children were killed or captured; outlying cabins were attacked and burned; the husbandman was shot as he worked in the field, and the housewife as she went for water.  The victim was now a militiaman on his way to join his company, now one of a party of immigrants, now a settler on his lonely farm, and now a justice of the peace going to Court, or a Baptist preacher striving to reach the Cumberland country that he might preach the word of God to the people who had among them no religious instructor.  The