The Creeks in particular never had had any claim to this Cumberland country, which was a hundred miles and over from any of their towns.

All the use they had ever made of it was to visit it with their hunting parties, as did the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Shawnees, Delawares, and many others.

Yet the Creeks and other Indians had the effrontery afterwards to assert that the Cumberland Country had never been ceded at all, and that as the settlers in it were thus outside of the territory properly belonging to the United States, they were not entitled to protection under the treaty entered into with the latter.
Blount's Good Faith with the Indians.
Blount was vigilant and active in seeing that none of the frontiersmen trespassed on the Indian lands, and when a party of men, claiming authority under Georgia, started to settle at the Muscle Shoals, he co-operated actively with the Indians in having them brought back, and did his best, though in vain, to persuade the Grand Jury to indict the offenders.

[Footnote: Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Sept.

3, 1791.] He was explicit in his orders to Sevier, to Robertson, and to District Attorney Jackson that they should promptly punish any white man who violated the provisions of the treaty; and over a year after it had been entered into he was able to write in explicit terms that "not a single settler had built a house, or made a settlement of any kind, on the Cherokee lands, and that no Indians had been killed by the whites excepting in defence of their lives and property." [Footnote: _Do_., Blount to Robertson, Jan.