()<) MYTHS OF THK CHEROKEE [kth. ann. I'.i 



overpowerod after a short resistance, and twenty-eight persons, inehid- 

 ing several women and ehildren, were kiikxl. The Indians left behind 

 a letter signed by four chiefs, including John Watts, expressing 

 regret for what they called the accidental killing of the women and 

 children, reminding the whites of their own treachery in killing 

 Abraham and the Tassel, and defiantly concluding, "When you move 

 off the land, then we will make peace." Other exposed stations were 

 attacked, until at last Sevier again mustered a force, cleared the 

 enemy from the frontier, and pursued the Indians as far as their 

 towns on the head waters of Coosa river, in such vigorous fashion that 

 they were compelled to ask for terms of peace and agree to a surrender 

 of prisoners, which was accomplished at Coosawatee town, in upper 

 Georgia, in the following April.' 



Among the captives thus restored to their friends were Joseph 

 Brown, a boy of sixteen, with his two younger sisters, who, with 

 several others, had been taken at Nickajack town while descending 

 the Tennessee in a flatboat nearly a year before. His father and the 

 other men of the party, about ten in all, had been killed at the time, 

 while the mother and several other children were carried to various 

 Indian towns, some of them going to the Creeks, who had aided the 

 Cherokee in the capture. Young Brown, whose short and simple 

 narrative is of vivid interest, was at first condemned to death, but was 

 rescued by a white man living in the town and was afterward adopted 

 into the family of the chief, in spite of the warning of an old Indian 

 woman that if allowed to live he would one day guide an army to 

 destroy them. The warning was strangely prophetic, for it was 

 Brown himself who guided the expedition that finally rooted out the 

 Chickamauga towns a few j^ears later. When rescued at Coosawatee 

 he was in Indian costume, wnth shirt, breechcloth, scalp lock, and 

 holes bored in his ears. His little sister, five years old, had become 

 so attached to the Indian woman who had adopted her, that she 

 refused to go to her own mother and had to be pulled along by force.' 

 The mother and another of the daughters, who had been taken by the 

 Creeks, were afterwards ransomed by McGillivray, head chief of the 

 Creek Nation, who restored them to their friends, generously refusing 

 any compensation for his kindness. 



An arrangement had been made with the Chickasaw, in 1783, by 

 which they surrendered to the Cumberland settlement their own claim 

 to the lands from the Cumberland river south to the dividing ridge of 

 Duck river.' It was not, however, until the treaty of Hopewell, two 

 years later, that the Cherokee surrendered their claim to the same 

 region, and even then the Chickamauga warriors, with their allies, the 



1 Ramsey, Tennessee, pp. 515. 519. 



• Brown's narrative, etc., ibid., pp. 50S-516. 



8 Ibid., pp. 459, 489. 



