The War in the Northwest 375 



sued. The frontiersmen settled on any spot of good 

 land they saw fit, and clung to it with defiant tenac- 

 ity, whether or not it afterward proved to be on a 

 tract previously granted to some land company or 

 rich private individual who had never been a hun- 

 dred miles from the seacoast. Public officials went 

 into these speculations. Thus Major Joseph Mar- 

 tin, while an Indian agent, tried to speculate in 

 Cherokee lands. 13 Of course the officer's public in- 

 fluence was speedily destroyed when he once under- 

 took such operations; he could no longer do justice 

 to outsiders. Occasionally the falseness of his po- 

 sition made him unjust to the Indians; more often 

 it forced him into league with the latter, and made 

 him hostile to the borderers. 14 



Before the end of the Revolution the trouble be- 

 tween the actual settlers and the land speculators 

 became so great that a small subsidiary civil war was 

 threatened. The rough riflemen resolutely declined 

 to leave their clearings, while the titular owners ap- 

 pealed to the authority of the loose land laws, and 

 wished them to be backed up by the armed force of 

 the State. 15 



The government of North Carolina was far too 

 weak to turn out the frontiersmen in favor of the 

 speculators to whom the land had been granted, 



13 See Va. State Papers, III, 560. 



14 This is a chief reason why the reports of the Indian 

 agents are so often bitterly hostile toward those of their 

 own color. 



15 See in Durrett MSS. papers relating to Isaac Shelby; 

 letter of John Tayjor to Isaac Shelby, June 8, 1782. 



