Long Island of the Holston

In the South Fork of the Holston River, just across the water from downtown Kingsport, sits a four-mile-long island that was once one of the most significant places in the entire Cherokee world. Tennessee's first National Historic Landmark, Long Island of the Holston holds centuries of diplomacy, betrayal, and resistance in its soil.

The Cherokee called it Amalesagusi, and they considered it sacred ground. Because of its spiritual status, it served as a neutral meeting place where violence was forbidden, where tribal disputes could be resolved without bloodshed, and where the most consequential decisions about land and war could be made. It sat at the midpoint of the Great Indian Warrior Path, the major north-south corridor that connected the Cherokee homeland in the Appalachians to the broader indigenous world.

In March of seventeen seventy-five, land speculator Richard Henderson and a young frontiersman named Daniel Boone negotiated the Transylvania Purchase at Sycamore Shoals, in present-day Elizabethton, acquiring from some Cherokee leaders more than twenty million acres of what is now Tennessee and Kentucky for trade goods. But the war chief Dragging Canoe refused to sign. Standing before the assembled negotiators, he warned that the lands they were claiming would become dark and bloody. He was right. That same year, Cherokee warriors who sided with Dragging Canoe struck frontier settlements in present-day North Carolina and Tennessee.

After those attacks were repulsed, the defeated Cherokee were forced to sign the Treaty of Long Island of the Holston on July twentieth, seventeen seventy-seven, ceding vast territories in the Carolinas. But Dragging Canoe refused to stop fighting. He led his followers south to Chickamauga Creek and continued the war against American expansion for another two decades.

The island also served as the departure point for the Overmountain Men in seventeen eighty, the militia forces who went on to defeat British Colonel Patrick Ferguson at the Battle of Kings Mountain. And it was the end of the first wagon road to the Southwest, the launching place for the earliest American push beyond the Appalachians.

The Cherokee finally ceded the island itself in the Dearborn Treaty of eighteen oh six, long after they had surrendered all the surrounding land. They held on to it as long as they possibly could.