Though the most dangerous of all foes on their own ground, their extreme caution and dislike of suffering punishment prevented them from ever making really determined efforts to carry a fort openly by storm; moreover, these stockades were really very defensible against men unprovided with artillery, and there is no reason for supposing that any troops could have carried them by fair charging, without suffering altogether disproportionate loss.

The red tribes acted in relation to the Cumberland settlements exactly as they had previously done towards those on the Kentucky and Watauga.

They harassed the settlers from the outset; but they did not wake up to the necessity for a formidable and combined campaign against them until it was too late for such a campaign to succeed.

If, at the first, any one of these communities had been forced to withstand the shock of such Indian armies as were afterwards brought against it, it would, of necessity, have been abandoned.
Indian Hostilities.
Throughout '81 and '82 the Cumberland settlers were worried beyond description by a succession of small war parties.

In the first of these years they raised no corn; in the second they made a few crops on fields they had cleared in 1780.