EDITORIAL: Footnote 1 documents the fear the United States had of the Lower Town Chickamauga and the Lower Creek. There was always a fear that the Creek would rise and join together with their Lower Town Chickamauga allies to attack and continue attacking the colonial, illegal, immigrant, squatters who continued to be allowed to violate the Treaties. In other locations, GW feigns a missunderstanding of why the Chickamauga continued to fight to enforce their Treaty rights against the colonials, and citizens of the Untied States.
Henry Knox to Tobias Lear, 15 June 1793
Henry Knox to Tobias Lear
[Philadelphia] 15th June 1793
Dear Sir
Please to submit to the President a letter from Gov. Blount of the 9th of May relatively to the measures he adopted for the defence of Cumberland1—the last letters, before the present from Gov. Blount were dated the 15th of May.2 Yours sincerely
H. Knox
ALS, DLC:GW; LB, DLC:GW.
1. Southwest Territory governor William Blount wrote Knox on 9 May that “the enclosed copies of letters and orders to General [James] Robertson, and of my order to Major [Hugh] Beard, will fully inform you of the steps I have taken to relieve the district of Mero from the invasion of the Creeks. … The Cherokees appear generally disposed for peace, but they have not yet determined whether they will accept the invitation of the President to visit him at Philadelphia.” Blount reported that two parties of Creeks had passed the Lower Cherokee village of Lookout Mountain in Georgia “between the 25th and 30th, for war against Cumberland, one of twenty-five the other of eighteen, and that, on the 26th, a party returned from Cumberland, with hair.” For Blount’s letter and its enclosures, see ASP, Indian Affairs, 451–53; see also JPP, 178–81, for a summary in GW’s executive journal of these letters. Bartholomew Dandridge, Jr., returned Blount’s letter and its enclosures under cover of his letter to Knox of 17 June 1793 (DLC:GW). For a description of the Mero District, including the settlements along the Cumberland River, and the difficulties involved in its defense, see Blount to Knox, 14 Jan. 1793; Carter, Territorial Papers, 4:226–34.
2. Knox had enclosed Blount’s letters to him of 12 and 15 May in his letter to Tobias Lear of 11 June 1793.
(C) This document was produced at the request of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on July 18, 2019, to document the History, Anthropology, Culture, Religion, and Archaeology of The Chickamauga Nation.