At the time of which I write, several of the log cabins of Echota were occupied by traders, adventurous white men who, tempted by the profit of the traffic with the Cherokees, had been led to a more or less constant residence among them.  Their cabins contained their stock in trade,—­traps, guns, powder and lead, hatchets, looking-glasses, “stroud,” beads, scarlet cloth, and other trinkets, articles generally of small cost, but highly prized by the red-men, and for which they gave in exchange peltries of great value.  The trade was one of slow returns, but of great profits to the trader.  And it was of about equal advantage to the Indian; for with the trap or rifle he had gotten for a few skins he was able to secure more game in a day than his bow and arrow and rude “dead-fall” would procure for him in a month of toilsome hunting.  The traders were therefore held in high esteem among the Cherokees, who encouraged their living and even marrying among them.  In fact, such alliances were deemed highly honorable, and were often sought by the daughters of the most distinguished chiefs.  Consequently, among the trader’s other chattels would often be found a dusky mate and a half-dozen half-breed children; and this, too, when he had already a wife and family somewhere in the white settlements.

These traders were an important class in the early history of the country.  Of necessity well acquainted with the various routes traversing the Indian territory, and with the state of feeling among the savages, and passing frequently to and fro between the Indian towns and the white settlements, they were often enabled to warn the whites of intended attacks, and to guide such hostile parties as invaded the Cherokee territory.  Though often natives of North Carolina or Virginia, and in sympathy with the colonists, they were, if prudent of speech and behavior, allowed to remain unmolested in the Indian towns, even when the warriors were singing the war-song and brandishing the war-club on the eve of an intended massacre of the settlers.

Living in Echota at this time was one of this class who, on account of his great services to the colonists, is deserving of special mention.  His name was Isaac Thomas, and he is said to have been a native of Virginia.  He is described as a man about forty years of age, over six feet in height, straight, long-limbed, and wiry, and with a frame so steeled by twenty years of mountain-life that he could endure any conceivable hardship.  His features were strongly marked and regular, and they wore an habitual expression of comic gravity; but on occasion his dark, deep-set eye had been known to light up with a look of unconquerable pluck and determination.  He wore moccasins and hunting-shirt of buckskin, and his face, neck, and hands, from long exposure, had grown to be of the same color as that material.  His coolness and intrepidity had been shown on many occasions, and these qualities, together with his immense strength, had