[The Winning of the West, Volume One by Theodore Roosevelt]@TWC D-Link book
The Winning of the West, Volume One

CHAPTER VII
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The Indians, already pleased with his embassy, finally consented to pass the affair over and not take vengeance upon innocent men.

Then the daring backwoods diplomatist, well pleased with the success of his mission, returned to the anxious little community.
The incident, taken in connection with the plundering of a store kept by two whites in Holston Valley at the same time, and the unprovoked assault on Boon's party in Powell's Valley a year later, shows the extreme difficulty of preventing the worst men of each color from wantonly attacking the innocent.

There was hardly a peaceable red or law-abiding white who could not recite injuries he had received from members of the opposite race; and his sense of the wrongs he had suffered, as well as the general frontier indifference to crimes committed against others, made him slow in punishing similar outrages by his own people.

The Watauga settlers discountenanced wrong being done the Indians, and tried to atone for it, but they never hunted the offenders down with the necessary mercilessness that alone could have prevented a repetition of their offences.

Similarly, but to an even greater degree, the good Indians shielded the bad.[36] For several years after they made their lease with the Cherokees the men of the Watauga were not troubled by their Indian neighbors.


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