the Cherokees, claimed from time immemorial. Only three weeks
before, John Stuart, Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the
Southern Department, had negotiated with the Cherokees the Treaty
of Hard Labor, South Carolina (October 14th), by which Governor
Tryon's line of 1767, from Reedy River to Tryon Mountain, was
continued direct to Colonel Chiswell's mine, the present
Wytheville, Virginia, and thence in a straight Brie to the mouth
of the Great Kanawha. Thus at the close of the year 1768 the
crown through both royal governor and superintendent of Indian
affairs acknowledged in fair and open treaty the right of the
Cherokees, whose Tennessee villages guarded the gateway, to the
valley lands east of the mountain barrier as well as to the dim
mid-region of Kentucky. In the very act of negotiating the Treaty
of Fort Stanwix, Sir William Johnson privately acknowledged that
possession of the trans-Alleghany could be legally obtained only
by extinguishing the title of the Cherokees.

These conflicting claims soon led to collisions between the
Indians and the company's settlers. In the spring of 1769
occurred one of those incidents in the westward advance which,
though slight in itself, was to have a definite bearing upon the
course of events in later years. In pursuance of his policy, as
agent of the Loyal Land Company, of promoting settlement upon the
company's lands, Dr. Thomas Walker, who had visited Powell's
Valley the preceding year and come into possession of a very
large tract there, simultaneously made proposals to one party of
men including the Kirtleys, Captain Rucker, and others, and to
another party led by Joseph Martin, trader of Orange County,
Virginia, afterward a striking figure in the Old Southwest. The
fevered race by these bands of eighteenth-century "sooners" for