Royce. ] TREATY OF NOVEMBER 28, 1785. 39 
chiefs visited Charleston, with proposals of friendship, and at the same 
time solicited the assistance of the governor in their operations against 
the Esau and Coosaw tribes, who had captured and earried off a number 
of Cherokees. 
The Savannah Indians, it seems, had also been engaged in incursions 
against them, in the course of which they had captured a number of 
Cherokees and sold them to the colonial authorities as slaves. 
The delegation urgently solicited the governor’s protection from the 
further aggressions of these enemies and the return of their bondaged 
countrymen. The desired protection was promised them, but as their 
enslaved brethren had already been shipped to the West Indies and 
sold into slavery there, it was impossible to return them. 
The extreme eastern settlements of the Cherokees at this time were 
within the limits of the present Chester and Fairfield districts, South 
Carolina, which lie between the Catawba and Broad Rivers.! 
MENTION BY VARIOUS EARLY AUTHORS. 
We next find an allusion to the Cherokees in tbe annals of Louisiana 
by M. Pericaut, who mentions in his chronicle of the events of the year 
1702, that ‘* ten leagues from the mouth of this river [Ohio] another 
falls into it called Kasquinempas [Tennessee]. It takes its source from 
the neighborhood of the Carolinas and passes through the village of the 
Cherokees, a populous nation that number some fifty thousand war- 
riors,” another example of tle enormous overestimates of aboriginal: pop- 
ulation to which the earlier travelers and writers were so prone. 
Again, in 1708, the same author relates that ‘‘about this time two Mo- 
bilians who had married in the Alibamon nation, and who lived among 
them with their families, discovered that that nation was inimical to 
the Mobilians as well as the French, and had made a league with the Che- 
raquis, the Abeikas, and the Conchaques to wage war against the French 
and Mobilians and burn their villages around our fort.” 
On various early maps of North America, and particularly those of 
De L’Isle, between the years 1700 and 1712, will be found indicated upon 
the extreme headwaters of the Holston and Clinch Rivers, “ gros villages 
des Cheraqui.” These villages correspond in location with the great na- 
tior® alluded to in the narrative of Sir William Berkeley’s expedition. 
Upon the same maps will be found designated the sites of sundry 
other Cherokee villages, several of which are on the extreme headwaters 
of the “Rh. des Chaouanons.” This river, although indicated on the 
map as emptying into the Atlantic Ocean to the west of the Santee, 
from its relation to the other streams in that vicinity, is believed to be 
intended for the Broad River, which is a principal northwest branch of 
the Santee. Other towns will also be found on the banks of the Upper 
Catawba, and they are, as well, quite numerous along the headwaters 
of the *“‘ R. des Caouilas ” or Savannah and of the Little Tennessee. 


*Logan’s South Carolina, Vol. i, p. 14i. 
