the Scotch, French, and English half-breed interpreters [Footnote:  Do., e.g., the letter of Galphin and Douzeazeaux, June 14, 1787.] from the outlandishly-named Muscogee chiefs—­the Hallowing King of the War Towns, the Fat King of the White or Peace Towns, the White Bird King, the Mad Dog King, and many more.  But they soon found that the Creeks were quite as much to blame as the Georgians, and were playing fast and loose with the United States, promising to enter into treaties, and then refusing to attend; their flagrant and unprovoked breaches of faith causing intense anger and mortification to the Commissioners, whose patient efforts to serve them were so ill rewarded. [Footnote:  American State Papers, Vol.  IV., p. 74, September 26, 1789.] Moreover, to offset the Indian complaints of lands taken from them under fraudulent treaties, the Georgians submitted lists [Footnote:  Do., p. 77, October 5, 1789.] of hundreds of whites and blacks killed, wounded, or captured, and of thousands of horses, horned cattle, and hogs butchered or driven off by Indian war parties.  The puzzled Commissioners having at first been inclined to place the blame of the failure of peace negotiations on the Georgians, next shifted the responsibility to McGillivray, reporting that the Creeks were strongly in favor of peace.  The event proved that they were in error; for after McGillivray and his fellow chiefs had come to New York, in the summer of 1790, and concluded a solemn treaty of peace, the Indians whom they nominally represented refused to be bound by it in any way, and continued without a change their war of rapine and murder.

    The Indians as Much to Blame as the Whites.

In truth the red men were as little disposed as the white to accept a peace on any terms that were possible.  The Secretary of War, who knew nothing of Indians by actual contact, wrote that it would be indeed pleasing “to a philosophic mind to reflect that, instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population ... we had imparted our knowledge of cultivation and the arts to the aboriginals of the country,” thus preserving and civilizing them [Footnote:  American State Papers, Vol.  IV., pp. 53, 57, 60, 77, 79, 81, etc.]; and the public men who represented districts remote from the frontier shared these views of large, though vague, beneficence.  But neither the white frontiersmen nor their red antagonists possessed “philosophic minds.”  They represented two stages of progress, ages apart; and it would have needed many centuries to bring the lower to the level of the higher.  Both sides recognized the fact that their interests were incompatible; and that the question of their clashing rights had to be settled by the strong hand.

    The Trouble Most Serious in the North.