The Indian frontier in the South was a zone of intercolonial as well as international contacts and rivalries. Except when Indian wars in 1711 and 1715 prompted some mutual aid, the usual relations of the Carolinians with Virginia, and later with Georgia, were those of jealous rivalry for the Indian trade. This led to discriminatory legislation and to bitter controversies which were carried home for settlement. The area of conflict with Virginia comprised the Catawba and Cherokee nations. Curiously, the Charles Town government was aroused to the French danger on the Mississippi quite as early as to Virginian rivalry in the piedmont and the southern Appalachians. Carolinian expansion in the seventeenth century had been mainly southward and westward. Meanwhile, the elder William Byrd and the other successors of Abraham Wood in the 'foreign' trade had been sending their caravans to the Catawba towns by the famous Occaneechi path, described by the younger Byrd in his 'History of the Dividing Line,' and by a circuitous route through the North Carolina foothills, to the Cherokee beyond. In 1686 Byrd reported that two of his traders had been killed more than four hundred miles from the falls of the James. But even at the height of this trade Virginia exported only a fraction of the deerskins despatched from Charles Town to England, though considerably more beaver. From 1699-1715 the average was about one-quarter of the Carolina exports of deerskins. 65 [Note 65: William Byrd, Writings; Spotswood, Letters. In 1716 the agent of the Virginia Indian company told the Board of Trade 'that formerly there were 10,000 Skins Yearly Imported from Virginia' (JBT, July 10, 1716)]