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Updated: June 23, 2025
His force was not a hundred strong; but if Robertson had been safely out of the savage hold, he might have enjoyed a visit from Oconostota and his twelve hundred Ottari warriors. The fort was planned by Sevier, who had no military training except such as he had received under his patron and friend Lord Dunmore.
Oconostota sat now with his back to it, with all his council of chiefs in a semicircle about him, on the buffalo rug on the broad hearth. The Indian interpreter Quoo-ran-be-qua, the great Oak, stood behind him and looked across the length of the room at Captain Stuart, the only other person standing, and clattered out his wooden sentences. Stuart could make no further effort.
"Ground Fa'lock!" only such injury as bootless folly might compass was to be deplored, but upon the terrepleine in the northeast bastion several Cherokees were working at one of the great cannons, among whom was no less a personage than Oconostota himself, striving to master the secrets of its service.
"I did not invite you to come here," he said to Oconostota, and despite the remonstrance of the delegation, and doubtless thinking he could treat with the savages to more effect at the head of an armed force invading their country, he postponed hearing their "talk" till he should have joined his little army, but offered them safe-conduct in accompanying his march.
As years went by, however, either because of the death of Colannah, or because time had so far softened the bereavement of the friends of Otasite that they were prevailed upon to accept the "satisfaction," the presents required even from an in voluntary homicide, he was evidently freed from the restricted limits of the "ever-sacred soil," for his name is recorded in the list of warriors who went to Charlestown in 1759 to confer with Governor Lyttleton on the distracted state of the frontier, and being held as one of the hostages of that unlucky embassy, he perished in the massacre of the Cherokees by the garrison of Fort Prince George, after the treacherous murder of the commandant, Captain Coytmore, by a ruse of the Indian king, Oconostota.
And there Captain Stuart learned the reason of the Cherokee king's interference yesterday to postpone his fate. For Oconostota had evolved the bold project of the reduction of Fort Prince George.
Oh, yes, the express had seen Oconostota. But for Oconostota he could not have made Fort Loudon. He had let him come with the two warriors, set free by Montgomery to suggest terms of peace and spread the news of the devastation, as a safe-guard against any straggling white people they might chance to meet, and in return they afforded him safe-conduct from the Cherokees.
Silent and stony they sat, looking neither to the right nor left, unmoved by urgency, stolid to remonstrance, and only when Demeré with a flash of fire suggested that Governor Lyttleton of South Carolina, or General Amherst the new "head-man," who was now commander-in-chief of the army, would soon take fierce measures to retaliate these enormities, there was a momentary twinkle in the crafty eyes of Oconostota, and he spoke briefly.
Then, extending his hand to Robertson, he says, "Our white brother is welcome. We have eaten of his venison and drunk of his fire-water. He is welcome. Let him speak. Oconostota will listen." The white man returns cordially the grasp of the Indian; and then, still standing, while all about him seat themselves on the ground, he makes known the object of his coming.
One would expect to find this apprehension to be the keenest where the danger would be the greatest. But not so. Whenever I related how Isaac Crabtree had murdered Cherokee Billy, brother of the powerful Oconostota, the pessimists were positive that the Cherokee nation would lay down a red path.
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