Such a letter as that quoted above makes the advisers of King George the Third directly responsible for the manifold and frightful crimes of their red allies.
It is small wonder that such a contest should have roused in the breasts of the frontiersmen not only ruthless and undying abhorrence of the Indians, but also a bitterly vindictive feeling of hostility towards Great Britain; a feeling that was all-powerful for a generation afterwards, and traces of which linger even to the present day.
Moreover, the Indian forays, in some ways, damaged the loyalist cause.
The savages had received strict instructions not to molest any of the king's friends;[17] but they were far too intent on plunder and rapine to discriminate between whig and tory.

Accordingly their ravages drove the best tories, who had at first hailed the Indian advance with joy, into the patriot ranks, making the frontier almost solidly whig; save for the refugees, who were willing to cast in their lot with the savages.[18] While the Creeks were halting and considering, and while the Choctaws and Chickasaws were being visited by British emissaries, the Cherokees flung themselves on the frontier folk.

They had been short of ammunition; but when the British agents sent them fifty horse-loads by a pack-train that was driven through the Creek towns, they no longer hesitated.[19] The agents showed very poor generalship in making them rise so early, when there were no British troops in the southern States, and when the Americans were consequently unhampered and free to deal with the Indians.[20] Had the rising been put off until a British army was in Georgia, it might well have proved successful.
The Cherokee villages stood in that cluster of high mountain chains which mark the ending of the present boundaries of Georgia and both Carolinas.

These provinces lay east and southeast of them.

Directly north were the forted villages of the Watauga pioneers, in the valley of the upper Tennessee, and beyond these again, in the same valley, the Virginian outpost settlements.