George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[424] forced marches and rainy weather, were walking

chap. XVIII.} 1761.

through thick woods on the bank of the Cowhowee, or, as we call it, the Little Tennessee, about two miles from the battle-ground of Montgomery, at a place where the path runs along the foot of a mountain on the right, and near the river on the left, the Cherokees were discovered hovering over the right flank, while others fired from beyond the river. Quintine Kennedy, with a corps of ninety Indians and thirty Carolina woodsmen, began the attack. The unseen enemy were driven from their ambush near the river, but again rallied, mingling the noise of musketry with shouts and yells. After three hours exposure to an irregular fire, the troops, following the river, emerged from the defile into an open savanna. Meantime the Indian whoop was heard as it passed from the front to the encumbered rear of the long-extended line, where the Cherokee fire seemed heaviest; but Middleton sent opportune relief, which secured the baggage. Happily for Grant, the Cherokees were in great need of ammunition. Of the white men, ten were killed and forty badly wounded; to save the dead from the scalping-knife, the river was their place of burial. Not till midnight did the army reach its place of encampment at Etchowe.

For thirty days the whites sojourned west of the Alleghanies. They walked through every town in the middle settlement; and the Outside Towns, which lay on another branch of the Tennessee The lovely hamlets, fifteen in number, were pillaged, burned, and utterly destroyed. That year the Cherokees had opened new fields for maize, not in the vales only, but on the sides and summits of the hills, where the fugitives from the lower settlements were to make