THE  CUMBERLAND PEOPLE.

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government was found, and it appeared how traitorously the wily Kentuckian had bargained away the western settlements. His correspondence with Miro in the spring of this year (1788), which was sent down the river by boat, and has also been preserved, shows how he attempted to augment the hopes of the Spanish governor by assuring him that all was well; that there was no likelihood of Congress thwarting their plans ; and that he had succeeded in blinding Washington, " the future king of America," as he called him. With these assurances, Miro had little difficulty in writing to Madrid that the frontier colonies were secure for Spain.

Well he might think so, for both from Cumberland and the Holston, as well as from Kentucky, came the welcome tidings. In the Cumberland district, Robertson and McGillivray had indeed been running a tilt at each other. The Cumberland leader, supj>osing that Spanish intrigue had aroused the Creeks and the Chickamaugas, had made, as we have seen, a dash upon them at the Muscle Shoals. Miro had protested against Robertson's suspicions, and McGillivray had taken his revenge upon the whites. After this bloody satisfaction, that half-breed Creek intimated to Robertson that if he would consider the account closed, he was quite willing to bury the hatchet. Whereupon reconciliation went so far that in the spring of 1788, McGillivray informed Miro that Robertson and the Cumberland people were preparing to make friends with the Creeks and throw themselves into the arms of Spain. This meant a substantial triumph of Spanish interests, for Nashville, the Cumberland capital, which had grown to be a settlement of eighty or ninety log huts gathered about a court-house, had become the rallying-point for some five thousand hardy pioneers. These were scattered along eighty odd miles of the river bank, and constituted a self-sustaining community, thrown upon its own resources, and separated by a trackless wilderness from the dwellers on the Kentucky. With the settlement about Jonesboro', one hundred and eighty-three miles away, these Cumberland people had more intercourse, but still it was not very close. The track lay through a dangerous country, in which Martin had had many a struggle with the irascible Chickamaugas; but the way was soon made safer, when the trail was improved, and armed patrols passed to and fro. It