had buried several bags of gunpowder (in violation of the terms of surrender). This action has been suggested as a possible motive for the Cherokee attack at Cane Creek. But John Stevens, a member of the fort's garrison who survived the attack, suggested the Cherokee had planned the attack all along. Aftermath and later history After receiving news of the fort's capture, Governor Kerlerec of Louisiana dispatched French ships into the interior in an attempt to occupy the fort, but the ships were unable to navigate up the Tennessee River. In the summer of 1761, James Grant led an expedition that destroyed a dozen Lower and Middle towns. Seeing their position as untenable, the Cherokee negotiated a peace treaty with Grant, which was signed on September 23, 1761. In November, Old Hop negotiated a peace treaty with Byrd's men at Long Island of the Holston. Henry Timberlake and Thomas Sumter, soldiers in Byrd's expedition, visited the Overhill towns in 1761–1762 as part of a peace mission. In his Memoirs, Timberlake noted that Fort Loudoun was in ruins. Sequoyah, a 19th-century Cherokee craftsman who is known for creating an independent syllabary for his language, one of the few people to do so in a pre-literate society, was born about 1770 at Tuskegee, a village which had developed downriver and just south of the fort. He later lived in Alabama and Indian Territory. Americans may have used salvaged stones from Fort Loudoun to construct the Tellico Blockhouse in the 1790s, an outpost located across the river from the fort. Louis Phillipe, the future King of France, visited the Blockhouse while in exile in the United States in 1797, and noted that Fort Loudoun was mostly rubble and brush. He suggested the site of the fort had been poorly selected. After the Cherokee relinquished control of the area with the signing of the Calhoun Treaty in 1819, ownership of the fort's ruins changed hands several times. Historian P.M. Radford published an article about the fort, Old Fort Loudoun, in 1897, and noted that all traces of the fort, with the exception of the well, had disappeared. The following year, author Mary Noailles Murfree published a novel about the fort, The Story of Old Fort Loudon, which included several drawings by illustrator Ernest Peixotto. The Colonial Dames of America placed a marker at the site of the fort in 1917. In a 1925 article,