The latter, who was no fighter, and whose tools were treachery and craft, fled to the protection of the Spaniards.
Bowles, among other feats, plundered the stores of Panton, a white trader in the Spanish interest, and for a moment his authority seemed supreme; but the Spaniards, by a trick, got possession of him and put him in prison.
Intrigues of the Spaniards.
The Spaniards still claimed as their own the Southwestern country, and were untiring in their efforts to keep the Indians united among themselves and hostile to the Americans.

They concluded a formal treaty of friendship and of reciprocal guarantee with the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees at Nogales, in the Choctaw country, on May 14, 1792.

[Footnote: Draper MSS., Spanish Documents; Letter of Carondelet to Duke of Alcudia, Nov.

24, 1794.] The Indians entered into this treaty at the very time they had concluded wholly inconsistent treaties with the Americans.

On the place of the treaty the Spaniards built a fort, which they named Fort Confederation, to perpetuate, as they hoped, the memory of the confederation they had thus established among the Southern Indians.