Public officials went into these speculations.

Thus Major Joseph Martin, while an Indian agent, tried to speculate in Cherokee lands.

[Footnote: See Va.

State Papers, III., 560.] Of course the officer's public influence was speedily destroyed when he once undertook such operations; he could no longer do justice to outsiders.
Occasionally the falseness of his position made him unjust to the Indians; more often it forced him into league with the latter, and made him hostile to the borderers.

[Footnote: This is a chief reason why the reports of the Indian agents are so often bitterly hostile towards those of their own color.] Before the end of the Revolution the trouble between the actual settlers and the land speculators became so great that a small subsidiary civil war was threatened.