Wolfe's Illness and Despondency: Cherokees and Paris
On the first of June the English were ready to apply the scourge. They penetrated the beautiful Valley of the Keowee, on the western borders of Anderson District, in which well-built houses and cultivated fields gave tokens of a semi-civilization. That valley they plundered, and desolated it with fire, driving the families to the wooded hills, where they looked down upon their possessions utterly ruined. Onward the English marched over the hills and the headwaters of the Savannah to the Valley of the Little Tennessee. Down that valley they marched, compelled to fight almost every inch of their way in the heart of the Southern Alleghany Mountains. The whole country was aroused. The patriotism of the Cherokees gave intensity to their anger. The English were in serious peril, and Montgomery wisely retraced his steps. This movement left the English garrison at Fort Loudon, on the Tennessee, at the mercy of the savages, who murdered a part of them after they had surrendered, and scattered the remainder, as prisoners of war, among the tribes. Montgomery hastened to Charleston, and regardless of the prayers of the people, who feared the ire of the exasperated Cherokees, he embarked for Halifax.
The Cherokees were not subdued, but were more fiercely inflamed against the English. They prepared for the war-path the next year, when Colonel Grant appeared with a stronger force, and compelled them to stand on the defensive. He burned their villages, desolated their fields, and killed many of their warriors. Finally, the nation, dispirited, humbly sued for peace in June, 1761, and a treaty to that effect was made.
Although the war had ceased in America, the French and English continued it upon the ocean and among the West India islands, with almost unbroken success by the latter. It was ended by a treaty of peace negotiated in 1762, and signed at Paris on the 10th of February, 1763. By its terms France ceded to Great Britain all her claimed territory in America eastward of the Mississippi River, north of the latitude of the Iberville River, a little below Baton Rouge. New Orleans, and the whole of Louisiana, was ceded by France to Spain, at the same time; and so her entire possessions in North America, for which she had labored and fought for more than a century, were relinquished. Spain, with whom the English had been at war for a year previously, ceded East and West Florida to Great Britain, at the same time. Now the English held undisputed possession (excepting by the Indians) of the whole continent from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to the Frozen Sea, and by claimed prescriptive right, from ocean to ocean. The domain wrested from the French had been procured at a cost to Great Britain and her American colonies of five hundred and sixty million dollars.
The storm in the south had scarcely ceased when another, more portentous, was seen gathering in the northwest. All over the land from the Shenandoah Valley to Lake Superior, from Western New York and the line of the Alleghany Mountains stretching into the Carolinas, to the Mississippi River, a deep-rooted jealousy of the English appeared among the Indians after the conquest of Canada. They regarded the English as a nation of amazing power, who were ready to rob them of their lands and destroy their race. The treatment of the natives by the English was so cold and unfriendly when compared with the French, that the savages could feel no real friendship for the British, and it was only fear or policy that caused the Indians to make treaties with them. The chiefs were treated with contempt by the British officers, and so their pride was wounded; they treated the people as children or slaves, and so lost their respect. Traders cheated them and aroused their anger. In every way they were made to feel, by contrast with the conduct of the French, the meanness and wickedness of the English. The jealousy of the savages was crystallized into implacable hatred, and in 1761, they began to form confederacies and plotted conspiracies for the destruction of their English masters.
When, after the treaty of Paris in 1763, the tribes were informed that France had ceded the country to Great Britain, without asking their leave, there was wide-spread indignation among them. The arrogance of Amherst in his official intercourse with them fanned the flame, and a vast confederacy was formed for the purpose of attacking all of the English forts on the frontiers on the same day, to destroy their garrisons and to desolate their settlements, westward of the Alleghanies.