George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 5, 13th edition.

[166] the Mississippi; and not even the terrors of border

chap IX.} 1763. Oct.

wars with the savages ‘could stop the enthusiasm of running backwards to hunt for fresh lands,’¹ in men who loved no enjoyment like that of perfect persona] freedom in the companionship of nature. From Carolina the hunters² annually passed the Cumberland Gap, gave names to the streams and rocky ridges of Tennessee, and with joyous confidence chased game in the basin of the Cumberland river. On all the waters, from the Holston river to the head springs of the Kentucky and the Cumberland, there dwelt not one single human inhabitant. It was the waste forest and neutral ground that divided the Cherokees from the Five Nations and their dependents. The lovely region had been left for untold years the paradise of wild beasts, which had so filled the valley with their broods, that a thrifty hunter could, in one season, bring home peltry worth sixteen hundred dollars.³

So the Mississippi valley was entered at Pittsburg, on the New River, and on the Holston and Clinch. It was only Florida, the new conquest, accepted in exchange for Havana, that civilized men left as a desert. When, in July, possession of it was taken, the whole number of its inhabitants, of every age and sex, men, wives, children, and servants, was three thousand, and of these the men were almost all in the pay of the Catholic King.⁴ The possession of it had cost Spain nearly two hundred and thirty thousand