Page:A Century of Dishonor.pdf/280

262 and otherwise maltreated them till they died, five or six a day, then threw their dead bodies into the nearest marsh, and had them “trodden down in the mud—from whence they were soon exposed by the washing of the tides, and at low-water the prisoners beheld the carrion-crows picking the bones of their departed companions!” Also, that white men (British officers) were known at that time to have made thumb-screws out of musket-locks, to torture Georgia women, wives of “rebels,” to force them to reveal the places where their husbands were in hiding. Innate cruelty is not exclusively an Indian trait.

The Cherokees had the worst of the fighting on the British side during the Revolution. Again and again their towns were burnt, their winter stores destroyed, and whole bands reduced to the verge of starvation. At one time, when hard pressed by the American forces, they sent to the Creeks for help; but the shrewd Creeks replied, “You have taken the thorns out of our feet; you are welcome to them.” The Creeks, having given only limited aid to the British, had suffered much less severely. That any of the Indians should have joined the “rebel” cause seems wonderful, as they had evidently nothing to gain by the transfer of their allegiance to what must have appeared to them for a long time to be the losing side in the contest. For three years and a half Savannah was in the possession of the British, and again and again they had control of the entire State. And to show that they had no compunction about inciting the Indians to massacres they left many a written record—such, for instance, as this, which is in a letter written by General Gage from Boston, June, 1775: “We need not be tender of calling on the savages to attack the Americans.”

The first diplomatic relations of the United States Government with the Cherokees were in the making of the treaty of Hopewell, in 1785. At the Hopewell council the United States