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A CENTURY OF DISHONOR.

for you to go to him:” and they showed to the Indian a fine suit of scarlet clothes, and a sword, which they were about to give to a chief of the Tennessees who had become their ally.

But the Creek answered, “We love him. It is true, he does not give us silver; but he gives us everything we want that he has. He has given me the coat off his back, and the blanket from under him.”

At last the trustees of the Georgia Colony lost patience: very bitterly they had learned that paupers, however worthy, are not good stuff to build new enterprises of. In eighteen years the colony had not once furnished a sufficient supply of subsistence for its own consumption: farms which had been cultivated were going to ruin; and the country was rapidly degenerating in every respect. Dishonest traders had tampered with and exasperated the Indians, so that their friendliness could no longer be implicitly trusted in. For everything that went wrong the English Company was held responsible, and probably there were no happier men in all England on the 20th of June, 1752, than were the Georgia trustees, who on that day formally resigned their charter, and washed their hands of the colony forever.

The province was now formed into a royal government, and very soon became the seat of frightful Indian wars. The new authorities neither understood nor kept faith with the Indians: their old friend Oglethorpe had left them forever, and the same scenes of treachery and massacre which were being enacted at the North began to be repeated with heart-sickening similarity at the South. Indians fighting Indians—fighting as allies to-day with the French, to-morrow with the English; treaties made, and broken as soon as made; there was neither peace nor safety anywhere.

At last, in 1763, a treaty was concluded with the chiefs and headmen of five tribes, which seemed to promise better things, The Cherokees and Creeks granted to the King of England a