Dragging Canoe and the Chickamauga Wars

In seventeen seventy-five, as the American colonies were sliding toward revolution, the Cherokee Nation faced its own internal fracture. The issue was land, and the terms of survival.

A war chief named Dragging Canoe believed that any accommodation of European settlement was a path to extinction. When the majority of Cherokee leaders signed the Sycamore Shoals treaty ceding vast territories, Dragging Canoe refused. He is reported to have warned that the ceded land would become, in his phrase, a dark and bloody ground. He broke from the main nation with a devoted following and relocated down the Tennessee River to a cluster of towns along Chickamauga Creek, just east of where Chattanooga now stands.

From those Chickamauga towns, Dragging Canoe and his warriors launched raids against American settlements for nearly two decades. The Cherokee-American wars of seventeen seventy-six to seventeen ninety-four were some of the most sustained Native resistance in the eastern United States. When American militia destroyed the original Chickamauga towns in seventeen seventy-nine, Dragging Canoe simply moved further west and rebuilt. He died in seventeen ninety-two, but the resistance he had built continued for two more years under his successor John Watts.

The Chickamauga Creek that runs into the Tennessee River here still carries the name of those fighting towns. The later Civil War battle fought along that same creek, one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war, bears the name too. Dragging Canoe left that word on the landscape permanently, a reminder that what happened along these waters before eighteen sixty-three was itself a long and unresolved war.