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  • “Between Two Fires”Elusive Justice on the Cherokee-Tennessee Frontier, 1796–1814
  • Robert M. Owens (bio)

The decades after the American Revolution saw strenuous efforts to both foment and terminate bloodshed between Indians and whites. The key issue was, of course, the disposition of Indian lands. Common white frontiersmen and Indian warriors were quick to kill their opposites in an attempt to hold or seize territory, which often led to cyclical, retaliatory strikes, understood as blood feuds. By the late eighteenth century, frontier settlers increasingly viewed Indians, including the Cherokees, as significantly weaker, less honorable people. They saw Cherokees as a “dependent” people, first on Britain and then on the United States. This made the Cherokees inconstant and decidedly unmanly, as “men strove for independence, mastery, and competency.” Settlers came to assume that young warriors’ acts of violence typified all Cherokees while refusing to acknowledge that Indians’ attacks usually resulted from land encroachment or in response to white murders of Cherokees.1

Native and white chiefs, however, tended to seek more peaceful solutions to cross-cultural murders and warfare. They did so not from high-mindedness but from an understanding that only peaceful councils would bring the land purchases white leaders desperately sought and the trade goods payments that Indian leaders desperately needed. While Native and non-Native leaders could certainly yield to militant pressure for violence when material gains did not seem to be in the offing, they could show remarkable restraint (and short memory for insult) when profit appeared possible. Native and white leaders negotiated not just with each other but also with a confusing morass of overlapping sovereignties. Native, local settler, state, and national protocols all vied for jurisdiction at the intersection of legal fault lines. As Laura F. Edwards [End Page 38] reminds us, the Early Republic saw decades of state laws coevolving alongside “but never completely displac[ing]” local customs.2 The addition of Native cultures to the mix only increased this complexity. The Cherokee Nation’s relations with the burgeoning state of Tennessee in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provide an informative case study.

Despite some excellent recent works,3 Cherokee studies in this era still suffer from what one might call “Removal Fixation.” Secondary works on the southern Indians remain predominately focused on the period of Jacksonian Removal—admittedly an inherently dramatic and important era but hardly the sum total of Indian history. I hope this article will contribute to the slow but growing trend of scholarship concerning the Cherokees and the South in the Early Republic. The era saw tremendous cultural strain and change for the Cherokees, including revolutionary alterations to their economy, gender roles, government, and how they processed murder. This study focuses on two striking cases of violent death and legal resolution that have, almost inexplicably, been ignored by academics. The 1796 murder of the Cherokee Red Bird and the 1813 beating of the white settler John Tally exposed serious flaws in Cherokee sovereignty, frontier justice, and the fragile peace between the United States and the Cherokee Nation.

The years 1790–95 proved exceptionally violent ones for Indians and whites along the Trans-Appalachian frontier. But with the Treaty of Greenville (1795) north of the Ohio, treaties with the Cherokees in 1791 and 1794, and the Creeks in 1796,4 it seemed that true peace might extend across the western territories for the first time in twenty years. The efforts of senior leaders from the US and Indian nations show just how eager they were to maintain the long-overdue quiet. Tragically, others were just as determined to continue the violence. As historian David Nichols and others have shown,5 a key feature of frontier politics in the 1790s involved Federalists and their Indian allies attempting to keep the peace, while others sought, for a combination of reasons, to thwart them. While whites on the frontier and in the seat of government almost universally sought to acquire Indian lands, government officials wanted to keep the peace to facilitate land sales. Federalists especially wanted them to be paced and orderly, yet ordinary frontiersmen often disrupted the peace in part to accelerate their extralegal land grabs.

The brutal murder of...

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