Alarmed by the land cessions made by chiefs of the Lower Towns without tribal consensus, the National Council of the Creek Confederacy enacted a law that made further land cessions by tribal members a capital offense. In 1825, William McIntosh and several Lower Creek chiefs signed the Treaty of Indian Springs with the US, by which they gave up most of the remaining Creek lands in Georgia in exchange for payment and removal to lands west of the Mississippi River. McIntosh and others of the Treaty Party by then believed that relocation was inevitable, given the increasing numbers of European-American settlers entering their region, and they wanted to get the best deal possible for the Creek Nation.