Virginia Council of Safety instructed Colonel William Christian, commander of the expedition against the Overhill towns, to insist on the Cherokees giving up all persons among them who had been concerned in bringing on the war—particularly Stuart, Cameron, and Gist.18
It was soon manifest, however, that Colonel Gist was not a British sympathizer. When Colonel Christian reached the Overhill towns Gist surrendered himself a prisoner, and although the inhabitants of Watauga and Holston had been so exasperated against him that his name was rarely mentioned without being coupled with a threat against his life yet Colonel Christian conveyed him through the settlements unmolested, and he proceeded on without further detention, to the headquarters of General Washington.18
December 27, 1776, the Continental Congress had resolved to raise sixteen new battalions, and authorized General Washington as commander-in-chief, to nominate and commission the officers of the same. Nathaniel Gist having reached Washington’s headquarters January 11, 1777, he was appointed colonel of one of these battalions, and authorized to raise four companies of rangers. For this purpose he was instructed to proceed to the Cherokee or any other nation of Indians, and attempt to procure a number of warriors, not exceeding five hundred, who were to be supplied with arms, blankets, and other necessaries, and, instead of presents, were to receive the same pay as troops in the Continental service.19
March 27, Colonel Gist returned to Washington District, bearing letters from the Governor of Virginia to the Cherokee nation, soliciting them to come in in sixty days to treat and confirm the peace.20 A few of them came in April 20, but nothing definite was done, except an agreement to come in sixty
days later to treat and confirm the peace.21 It was largely through the influence of Colonel Gist, acting under instructions from the Virginia government, that they were induced to attend the treaty of Long Island, July, 1777.22 In the progress of the treaty the Old Tassel expressed great reluctance to the proposed boundaries, and asked the commissioners to write a letter to General Washington by Colonel Gist23; and later in the conference Colonel Christian proposed that some of the Cherokee young men accompany Colonel Gist to Congress and to the army of General Washington,24 which seventeen of them did.25
Now Colonel Gist was living with the Cherokees on terms of intimate friendship, of which they have given the highest proofs, at the time Sequoya was born, about the year 1760. The family tradition that Sequoya was his son becomes almost a certainty when we consider that it was a general, almost a universal practice for white men living, even temporarily, in the nation, to take Indian wives; not, generally, “until death us do part,” but during the residence of the husband in the nation; after the manner of the Japanese marriage custom celebrated in Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthome. Many soldiers of the garrison of Fort Loudon had Indian wives who, during the siege, furnished them provisions at the risk of their lives; John Watts, father of the distinguished chief of the same name, married a sister of the Old Tassel, and the trader John Benge, progenitor of a less noted warrior, married his niece; General Joseph Martin, while temporarily residing at Echota as Indian agent, married Betsy, daughter of the celebrated Nancy Ward, though he had a wife of his own race back in the settlements; Leonard P. Shaw, memorable as the first United States ethnologist, but not otherwise, married a daughter of an influential warrior called Halfbreed; and Major Robert King, while employed by the government in the nation, lived with a daughter of Scollacutta, and only escaped being killed by jumping through a window, when Captain Beard’s party attacked his town. Return J. Meigs, writing in 1816, after fif-
teen years intercourse with the Indians, expressed the opinion that almost one-half of the Cherokee nation are of mixed blood by intermarriage with the white people.26
I have already stat