 He spent more than a month with these Indians, and was an eyewitness of the resistance of Principal Chief John Ross and the Cherokee people to the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota.The public purpose of his visit was to inspect for the Federal government the geology of the mountainous regions of Georgia and North Carolina where gold had been discovered, but there was also another covert mission.In his memoirs, Featherstonhaugh described a pleasant encounter with a learned Welsh-born Baptist missionary Rev.