immediately." The prisoners were accordinglj r sold for
about twelve hundred dollars. 1
At the Wolf Hills settlement, now Abingdon, Virginia, a party sent
out from the fort returned with the scalps of eleven warriors. Having
recovered the books which their minister had left behind in his cabin,
they held a service of prayer for their success, after which the fresh
scalps were hung upon a pole above the gate of the fort. The barba-
rous custom of scalping to which the border men had become habitu-
ated in the earlier wars was practiced upon every occasion when
opportunity presented, at least upon the bodies of warriors, and the
South Carolina legislature offered a bounty of seventy-five pounds for
every warrior's scalp, a higher reward, however, being offered for
prisoners.'- In spite of all the bitterness which the war arousedthere
seems to be no record of any scalping of Tories or other whites by the
Americans (-1).
The effect upon the Cherokee of this irruption of more than six
thousand armed enemies into their territory was well nigh paralyzing.
More than fifty of their towns had been burned, their orchards cut
down, their lields wasted, their cattle and horses killed or driven off.
their stores of buckskin and other personal property plundered.
Hundreds of their people had been killed or had died of starvation
and exposure, others were prisoners in the hands of the Americans,
and some had been sold into slavery. Those who had escaped were
fugitives in the mountains, living upon acorns, chestnuts, and wild
game, or were refugees with the British.' 1 From the Virginia line to
the Chattahoochee the chain of destruction was complete. For the
present