Louisiana and Aaron Burr 183 



posed, would prefer an open war to such a situa- 

 tion. The reason is obvious. A man would then 

 know when he saw an Indian he saw an enemy, and 

 would be prepared to act accordingly." 62 



The people of Tennessee were the wronged, and 

 not the wrongdoers, and it was upon them that the 

 heaviest strokes of the Indians fell. The Georgia 

 .frontiers were also harried continually, although 

 much less severely; but the Georgians were them- 

 selves far from blameless. Georgia was the young- 

 est, weakest, and most lawless of the original thir- 

 teen States, and on the whole her dealings with the 

 Indians were far from creditable. More than once 

 she inflicted shameful wrong on the Cherokees. The 

 Creeks, however, generally wronged her more than 

 she wronged them, and at this particular period even 

 the Georgia frontiersmen were much less to blame 

 than were their Indian foes. By fair treaty the In- 

 dians had agreed to cede to the whites lands upon 

 which they now refused to allow them to settle. 

 They continually plundered and murdered the out- 

 lying Georgia settlers; and the militia, in their re- 

 taliatory expeditions, having no knowledge of who 

 the murderers actually were, quite as often killed the 

 innocent as the guilty. One of the complaints of the 

 Indians was that the Georgians came in parties to 

 hunt on the neutral ground, and slew quantities of 

 deer and turkeys by fire hunting at night and by still- 

 hunting with the rifle in the daytime, while they 



68 American State Papers, Pickens to Blount, Hopewell, 

 April 28, 1792. 



