During this summer, to revenge the death of a couple of settlers, a backwoods Colonel, with the appropriate name of Outlaw, fell on a friendly Cherokee town and killed two or three Indians, besides plundering a white man, a North Carolina trader, who happened to be in the town.

Nevertheless, throughout 1786 the great majority of the Cherokees remained quiet.

[Footnote: Va.

State Papers, IV., pp.

162, 164, 176.] Early in 1787, however, they felt the strain so severely that they gathered in a great council and deliberated whether they should not abandon their homes and move far out into the western wilderness; but they could not yet make up their minds to leave their beloved mountains.
The North Carolina authorities wished to see them receive justice, but all they could do was to gather the few Indian prisoners who had been captured in the late wars and return them to the Cherokees.