154 ANTIQUITIES IN TENNESSEE. 



According to the testimony of the French writers,^ the Iroquois conquered and 

 incorporated the Satans, Chawanons, or Shawanons, " whom they had formerly 

 driven from the lakes," in their residence on the Cumberland and Ohio Rivers, 

 about the years 1672 or 1664. Governor Pownal, in his "Administration of the 

 British Colonies," says that about 1664, the Iroquois carried their arms as far south 

 as Carolina, and as far west as the Mississippi, over a vast country which extended 

 twelve hundred miles in length and about six hundred in breadth ; where they 

 destroyed whole nations of which there are no accounts remaining among the 

 Enwlish The Six Nations claimed the hunting lands of the Ohio Itiver, which 

 included the present state of Kentucky, and a large portion of middle and western 

 Tennessee, at the peace of Ryswick in 1697, in virtue of their conquest from the 

 Shawnees and other nations. In further confirmation of this Indian title, it should 

 be mentioned that Lewis Evans, a gentleman whom Dr. Franklin compliments as 

 possessed of great American knowledge, represents in his map of the middle 

 colonies of Great Britain on this continent, the country on the southeasterly side 

 of the Ohio River as the hunting lands of the Six Nations. In his analysis of his 

 map, he expressly says : " The Shawanese, who were formerly one of the most con- 

 siderable nations of those parts of America, whose seat extended from Kentucky 

 southwestward to the Mississippi, have been subdued by the confederates (or Six 

 Nations), and the country since became their property."^ 



Dr. Mitchell, who, at tlie solicitation of the British Board of Trade and Planta- 

 tions, published a map of North America, which was afterwards used for the 

 adjustment of the boundaries in the treaty of Paris in 1783, observes that " the 

 Six Nations have extended their territories ever since the year 1672, when they 

 subdued and were incorporated with the ancient Shawnese, the native proprietors 

 of these countries." 



From the " Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee," by John Haywood, 

 published in 1823, and from the " Annals of Tennessee," by Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey, 

 we gathered the following information with reference to the early history of the 

 Shawnees in Tennessee. 



The late General Ttobertson learned from the Indians that, in 1665, the Shaw- 

 nees occupied the country from the Tennessee River to where Nashville now 

 stands, and north of the Cumberland River; and that, about 1700, they left this 

 country and emigrated north, and were received as a wandering tribe by the Six 

 Nations, but were not allowed to have then any claim to the soil. As late as 1764 

 the Shawnees moved from Green River in Kentucky, where a part of them 

 resided, to the Wabash. In 1772, Little Corn Planter, an intelligent Cherokee 

 chief, narrated that thc^ Shawnees, a hundred years before, by the permission of 

 his nation, removed from tlie Savannah River to the Cumberland. INIany years 

 afterwards the two nations becoming unfriendly, the Cherokees marched against 

 the Shawnees and put a great many of them to death. The survivors then forti- 



' Dutler's History of Kentucky, pp. 1-5. 



' Franklin's Work, vol. iv, 271. 



A History of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, by Mann Butler, A.M., 1834, pp. 1-5. 



