express messengers and post riders, who went through the wilderness from one commander to the other, always rode at hazard of their lives.  In one of Blount’s letters to Robertson he remarks:  “Your letter of the 6th of February sent express by James Russell was handed to me, much stained with his blood, by Mr. Shannon, who accompanied him.”  Russell had been wounded in an ambuscade, and his fifty dollars were dearly earned. [Footnote:  Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, March 8, 1794.  The files of the Knoxville Gazette are full of details of these outrages, and so are the letters of Blount to the Secretary of War given in the American State Papers, as well as the letters of Blount and Robertson in the two bound volumes of Robertson MSS.  Many of them are quoted in more accessible form in Haywood.]

  Horse-stealing. 
  Brutal White Ruffians.

The Indians were even more fond of horse-stealing than of murder, and they found a ready market for their horses not only in their own nations and among the Spaniards, but among the American frontiersmen themselves.  Many of the unscrupulous white scoundrels who lived on the borders of the Indian country made a regular practice of receiving the stolen horses.  As soon as a horse was driven from the Tennessee or Cumberland it was hurried through the Indian country to the Carolina or Georgia frontiers, where the red thieves delivered it to the foul white receivers, who took it to some town on the seaboard, so as effectually to prevent a recovery.  At Swannanoa in North Carolina, among the lawless settlements at the foot of the Oconee Mountain in South Carolina, and at Tugaloo in Georgia, there were regular markets for these stolen horses. [Footnote:  Blount to the Secretary of War, May 5, 1792, and Nov. 10, 1794.  As before, I use the word “Tennessee” instead of “Southwestern Territory” for convenience; it was not regularly employed until 1796.] There were then, and continued to exist as long as the frontier lasted, plenty of white men who, though ready enough to wrong the Indians, were equally ready to profit by the wrongs they inflicted on the white settlers, and to encourage their misdeeds if profit was thereby to be made.  Very little evildoing of this kind took place Tennessee, for Blount, backed by Sevier and Robertson, was vigilant to put it down; but as yet the Federal Government was not firm in its seat, and its arm was not long enough to reach into the remote frontier districts, where lawlessness of every kind throve, and the whites wronged one another as recklessly as they wronged the Indians.

    Sufferings of the Honest Settlers. 
    Blount’s Efforts to Prevent Brutality.