Dragging Canoe: The Chickamauga Wars and Cherokee Resistance

On March 14, 1775, twelve hundred Cherokee gathered on the riverbank at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga to hear a North Carolina judge named Richard Henderson make an offer. His Transylvania Company wanted to buy the hunting grounds between the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers, and the old headmen, Attakullakulla among them, were ready to sign. One of the younger men was not. Tsi'yu-gunsini, the Little Carpenter's son, whom the English called Dragging Canoe, is remembered for warning the buyers that the land they bought would be dark and bloody ground.

When war came the next year, he led the young men who would not accept the bargain. After colonial militias burned the Cherokee towns in 1776, he took his followers down the Tennessee to Chickamauga Creek, and later to the Five Lower Towns below Lookout Mountain, and fought on with British and then Spanish arms against the Holston settlements, the stations along the Cumberland and the breakaway State of Franklin.

He died in 1792, still at war, and the war outlived him. Chickamauga and Creek warriors struck Buchanan's Station near Nashville that September, and the fighting ran on through Etowah and the road to Tellico before peace was made in 1794. The last chapter carries the argument he began at Sycamore Shoals, between signing and fighting, forward to the Trail of Tears.