The wrongs done and suffered cannot be blinked.
Neither can they be allowed to hide the results to mankind of what has
been achieved.
It is not possible to justify the backwoodsmen by appeal to principles
which we would accept as binding on their descendants, or on the mighty
nation which has sprung up and flourished in the soil they first won and
tilled. All that can be asked is that they shall be judged as other
wilderness conquerors, as other slayers and quellers of savage peoples,
are judged. The same standards must be applied to Sevier and his
hard-faced horse-riflemen that we apply to the Greek colonist of Sicily
and the Roman colonist of the valley of the Po; to the Cossack
rough-rider who won for Russia the vast and melancholy Siberian steppes,
and to the Boer who guided his ox-drawn wagon-trains to the hot grazing
lands of the Transvaal; to the founders of Massachusetts and Virginia,
of Oregon and icy Saskatchewan; and to the men who built up those
far-off commonwealths whose coasts are lapped by the waters of the great
South Sea.
Indian Hostilities.
The aggressions by the Franklin men on the Cherokee lands bore bloody
fruit in 1786. [Footnote: State Dept.
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