Episode 4: “A Cherokee History”
Introduction
Hello, and welcome to American Legends.
Episode 4: A Cherokee History
This next batch of episodes, more than I think any other, is going to typify why this period has been so hard to research and write about. To put it simply … we are going into the weeds here as far as most academia is concerned. You see, the common narrative when you’re looking into the confederate period is basically one long road to the constitution. If a historian isn’t paying close attention, they usually don’t look at much between October 1781 with the ending of the battle of Yorktown through to the treaty of Paris. That two year period, that we have been discussing the last three episodes, gets lumped in as a postscript to the Revolution. It’s like reading the final chapter of a novel. It’s wrap up for the plot threads that have been moving since 1770.
The only problem is, even though we history people like to wrap everything up into a nice little narrative, real life is rarely like that. The story of where the revolution ends and begins and where the confederate period begins and ends are vague at best, and usually overlap. As a result, in a rush to get to the Washington Administration, historians skip over everything from 1783 to 1789 with the exception of Shay’s Rebellion and the drafting of the constitution. And honestly, they only talk about Shay’s Rebellion because of how it’s believed to have influenced many of the founders to support a stronger central government. The fact of the matter is, A LOT of stuff happened in those intervening years, but they don’t always fit into the narrative historians construct, especially because no national figures are involved in them, and it also largely involves the bloodiest phase of American and Native American relations. The only problem is that no one in the last hundred years has talked substantially about many of those things, including what we’re going to discuss in the next few episodes, but don’t get me wrong. Obviously, some historians have, otherwise I wouldn’t have anything to pull from.
Sitting in front of me and beside me I have twelve full books written in the last twenty years about this period, and not one of them even briefly mentions what this next group of episodes is about. I have found a few substantial book written in the last ten years about the stirrings in the Appalachian back country in the 1780s since beginning to write this episode. Trying to find sources for these people has been a huge, huge pain. I’ve had to email some of my old professors and even a few Native American historians. They have been very helpful, and you know who you are. Thank you! And if I’m being honest, the only reason I know about what has come to be called the State of Franklin is because I’m from Tennessee, and the State of Franklin has attained a quasi-mythical status among many Tennessee historians. Part of this lack of knowledge is ease of access to primary sources regarding what happened. Most, if not all, only exist on microfilm or still on the original paper it was written on, or are from oral traditions on both sides of the conflict. Part of it is because virtually none of the prominent founding fathers had anything to do with the state of Franklin, so with such a narrow group of people being interested, and virtually all of them academics, there’s not been a major push to get some of these documents transcribed and bound in volumes like they have for Washington and the other core founding fathers. It’s also a very dark, bloody period in American history. It was our own little Vietnam in the hills of North Carolina that, spoiler alert resulted in illegal executions, bloody recriminations, and the attempted genocide of a people. And as if there’s not enough issues, there’s a massive amount of local revisionist history regarding the state of Franklin dating from the post-War of 1812 era and the Post-civil war era, that entangles a myriad of issues and complicates the characters involved. The actual sequence of events and motivations behind these core events in the “development” of western lands shift depending on who is writing the history and in what year they’re writing. Fortunately, recent scholarship, and greater interest in what is being called the “Atlantic World” is shining a light on why the state of Franklin is not only a fascinating chapter in American history, but also is critical to understanding the rapidly changing Post-revolutionary era.
That being said, to understand it fully, we need to go back a good, long ways; as a matter of fact, there’s enough backstory to require at least two background episode before the action even opens up in the spring of 1783. We are going to go back before the age of white people in the “new world.” Initially when I started my research on the State of Franklin, I hadn’t realized how it exemplified the movement westward after the American Revolution, and also, how connected it was to the far flung Ohio Valley, and how it factored into the power games of European Kings. History has taken it’s cues from the British and Americans, who separated Indian Affairs into a northern and southern department, but in reality, the lines between the two are just lines on a map. But to get the full context for both the Native American, and colonial American experience, we need to go in the way, way back machine.
Part 1: Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty and Despair
While the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II was wracked by the twenty years anarchy, and trying to scheme his way back to the throne, and while the whole of Western Europe sat in the ruins of what remained of the Roman empire, a whole other civilization emerged in what would become the “new world.” Even the name, new world, underlies a certain pejorative sense of what we call North America meant. By the time English settlers arrived in what they would call Virginia, the Americas were seen as a land of opportunity, a virgin soil that could be claimed by Europeans as the next logical step in their destiny to dominate the world. This viewpoint, and their understanding of Native American culture and history, pollutes our own understanding of who Native Americans were and their history.
You see, generally speaking when Americans look back at indigenous cultures they tend to go back to what they’ve seen on TV, or what the overall arch of Indo-American relationships resulted in. It’s always parsed in terms relative to how white settlers (and to some extent how the indigenous peoples themselves) perceived Native Americans; generally, Europeans viewed them as inferior. Not just intellectually and spiritually, but generally regarded as less than human. When you’re reading the early histories of the United States, Native Americans are either discussed as if they were just a step above animals, or as primitives who were dangerous impediments to the march of civilization. Benjamin Franklin, obviously one of the most respected Americans in the world at the time, one of the most respected in history, and one of those most sympathetic to Native American lifeways, said in 1751,
“It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies”
He was talking about the Iroquois, you know, one of the most powerful groups in the Americas, and saying it was crazy that some painted savages dithering in the woods could form a union whereas the colonies could not stop bickering amongst themselves. The thing is, this view not only totally undermines the complexity of native American societies, but also is a justification for why it was okay for white settlers to spread across the continent.
It is the root of manifest destiny. Reality, however, is far more complex.
As I stated early, as the cultures that would grow to dominate the new world, the French, English, and Spanish, still had yet to come into existence (they were still running around, occupying Roman ruins, fighting each other for fields to grow just enough crops to feed themselves — and not always succeeding, oscillating between paganism and primitive Catholicism, and dreaming someday of being as cool as these guys that made all these neat buildings and sculptures and stuff). In the heartland of the Americas, between 700-900 ad, a new way of life was emerging around the modern day town of St. Louis. Spreading out from a metropolis called Cahokia, a people we now call the Mississippian culture spread up and down the Mississippi river system. By the end of the Mississippian culture, their influence was felt as far west of the Rocky Mountains and as far east as the east coast; as far north as the great lakes and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. The influence of the Mississippian culture was wide and vast by modern standards. It’s total area was roughly the size of the Roman Empire at its height, if not larger. Population wise, Cahokia, with a population of around 15,000, was one of the largest cities in the northern hemisphere, and the largest city to exist in North America until Philadelphia surpassed it in the 1750s. London was still a quarter of it’s size at the time of Cahokia’s height in 1000 a.d.
The Mississippians are more colloquially known as the moundbuilders. This is because the mounds that dot the landscape all along the Mississippi River basin are all that remains of their civilization. Now, to be honest, calling them mounds is sometimes accurate, but usually not. These mounds often times started as earthen pyramids, that after hundreds of years of erosion slumped into mounds. The best example of this is Monk’s Mound in Cahokia, which still clearly maintains its step pyramid shape. There are pictures on the website or what it looks like now and an artistic rendering of what it’s believed to have looked like when it was in use. You can see that even with all the erosion it’s suffered in over a thousand years it’s still 100 feet high, almost 1000 feet long and over 700 feet wide. It’s a massive structure. For comparison, it’s the same base size as the Great Pyramid of Giza. That’s right, theres another wonder of the ancient world sitting in the American heartland … and basically no one knows about it.
We don’t really know as much about the people of Cahokia as we would like, because they didn’t leave a written record. It’s possible they had some other kind of non-verbal communication that has been lost to the ages. For instance, the Inca had a systems of knots and strings that conformed to a kind of communication, but no one knows how to read it. So even if the Mississippians had something like this, we’d never know how to interpret it. Most of what we know about the Cahokian culture we get from archeology and from what we know of the last surviving link to them, the Natchez people.
We know from the Natchez, and from accounts written by Spanish explorers, that the Mississippians were hierarchical, and actually controlled by a priest-chieftain. These chiefs operated as both the civil and religious authority in their towns, and their towns served as the central unit of organization. The Mississippians used the fertile banks of the Mississippi and it’s tributaries to build vast farming operations. These were not the hunter-gatherers of the imagination, these were a settled agrarian society that grew enough food to sustain massive populations. They then crafted goods; tools, pottery, religious icons, art, and used these as the foundation for a massive trade network; A network that communicated their culture and religion. This was a centralized civilization the way that westerners define civilization. They practiced city planning during a time Europeans did not create new cities, had a complex trade economy, they had an organized state religion, and massive levels of food production that sustained a large, sedentary population. It, in fact, looked more like a civilization than many of the “barbarian” kingdoms of the same period in Europe. They still, however, did not advance as far as the rest of the world had technologically, and are believed to have shared many traits with other early River Civilizations, such as the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Indus Valley civilization, but seeing as there’s no written record, it’s more problematic to rate. For instance, both the Aztec and Inca, contemporary civilizations, were very advanced in the way we perceive advancement, but Westerners had extensive contact with those groups before their decline. There was not really an option with the Mississippians.
It is believed that the decline of the Mississippians began with the arrival of the “little ice age,” a dip in global temperatures that was just enough to mess with the food supply, and as the chiefs of Cahokia struggled to explain the dip in production and the loss of the gods’ favor, the culture slipped into civil war. We know that warfare became commonplace in the late Mississippian period because their towns began to be fortified with palisades, and some sites were destroyed by fire. The power structure of the late Mississippian period was that of medieval Europe, with a powerful chief exerting military and religious authority over weaker towns, extorting their population for goods or supplies. It was this type of inter-town fighting that the Spanish stumbled in to. Between the Spanish’s first forays into the southeast of what became the United States, and the arrival of English Colonists in South Carolina, the collapse of the Mississippian culture was complete. Many of the Native American Nations that will play a significant role in our series, in particular the Creek Confederation and the Cherokee, still maintained the same importance on towns (some even still being built and centered around a central mound) and on gifting as the previous culture. This decline had been driven by infighting and exposure to European diseases. Some of the old Creek and Cherokee towns date back to the Mississippian period, although based on some of their cultural oral traditions, they either displaced the original Mississippian inhabitants, or the memory of they ties to the place dissolved as knowledge of the Mississippians faded.
Now I use the word decline because you see a drop in town population size, a decentralization of the society, and a breakup of what could be perceived as a greater nation. This is not to say that the Native American nations that appear later in the historical record are lesser people. In many ways, these later nations had far more complex societal structures and more complex early modern trade networks with Europeans. What I’m referring to is the same sort of thing you see after the fall of the Western Roman empire. You see the native population subsumed or absorbing migratory peoples moving into the same area as the centralization of the state breaks apart. In many ways, the processes by which we get the states of France and Spain and England is the same process by which we get the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Illinois, etc.
It’s also hard to undersell the dramatic effect of smallpox on the native populations. It’s believed that 95% of the Native American population was wiped out. Outbreaks of the plague in Europe had exacted a similar death toll in Europe, but it had never exceeded more than maybe a third of the population at one time. It was times of plague like that where you saw a destabilization of Europe. For instance, the Arabs were able to conquer the middle east during the outbreak of the Plague of Justinian.
This lack of a large indigenous population, combined with the beliefs of the Native Americans, and their way of life, gave rise to this idea that the Native Americans were a glimpse into the distance past, a look at what Europeans must have looked like in pre-history. This is not the case. What they were looking in to is what society looks like after a post-apocalypse. Native Americans circa-1750 had more in common with the world of Mad Max or the Hunger Games, than they did with pre-historic man.
Part 2: I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you
The first known contact between the Cherokee and the English colonizers was in 1673, when two Englishmen cross the mountains on a trade mission to the Overhill Cherokee. The Cherokee, at the time, were a distant, but powerful, tribe from the interior of the continent. The English did not realized this at the time, but the Cherokee were related, distantly, to the Iroquois. They spoke two different dialects within the same language family, and at the time the pre-contact Cherokee may have had settlements as far north as Lake Erie. This first encounter with the Cherokee is actually fascinating. Of the two traders, one was killed by their Native guide and the other disguises himself as if he’s one of the tribe as goes to war with them against the Spanish, Creeks, and Shawnee. But I digress.
At the time, and for almost a hundred years afterwards, the Cherokee straddled the Appalachian Mountains from modern day East Tennessee through to South Carolina. Most of this was hunting grounds, but there were extensive tracts for towns known as the Overhill towns, Middle Towns, and Lower Towns. The Lower Towns were in modern day South Carolina along the Keowee River, a tributary of the upper Savannah River. The Overhill Cherokee existed on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains along the Tennessee River. The Middle Towns existed between those two in western North Carolina.
One of the things that made Nations like the Cherokee different to the English settlers were three main things: social structure, egalitarianism, and blood vengeance.
Cherokee society was situated around your Clan and your town. The clan structure wasn’t like say, Scotland, where clans dominated a particular region. Each town and village was riddled with members of the different clans, and no clan held any region to themselves. These clans were like having a large extended family where most were not necessarily tied together by blood. And unlike in Europe, clan membership was matrilineal, and intermarriage was forbidden. Members of the clan would refer to each other as brother or sister, instead of say, cousin. This actually confuses the histories when trying to determine blood relations, as European historians didn’t always understand the clan structure because of how different it was from European systems.
This bleeds into the actual power structures of the town, which were more decentralized and more democratic than anything that had existed in Europe for hundreds, if not thousands, or years. Towns would hold a council which involved everyone in the town. People were allowed to speak on issues, and majority vote carried the day. The closest European analogue I can think of off hand was Classical Greece, before their democracy gave rise to demagogues. One of the reasons Cherokee didn’t give rise to demagogues is because there wasn’t a firm command structure to the military. There were multiple war leaders in each town and across the whole Nation, although the oldest and most successful would have their judgement deferred to, it was not a guarantee. The other reason is that the town priests acted as a counterbalance to the war leaders. These institutions became more centralized as contact with Europeans progressed. By the 1780s, each town had a war leader and a headmen, and individual headmen were recognized as chief of the nation, a role which they leveraged for greater support across towns.
This system didn’t account for a justice system, which is why the right of blood vengeance developed. In many ways this operated similarly to European forms of honor, except with a metaphysical bent. This was a strictly enforced tradition where if one member of a clan or nation killed someone else, another person could be killed as recompense for their crime. That being said, it wasn’t necessary that the person who committed the crime die, anyone belonging to that clan or nation could die in their place. This was because if you killed someone you could run off into say, Muscogee territory and hide. This would prevent justification for the slain. More importantly, unless someone was avenged their spirit wouldn’t be at peace. It was vital that their family or clan gain justice for the slain on the metaphysical level as well as the physical level. When everyone involved in the society understand the rules involved, it works, because it discourages murder. That being said, unless you spent time among the Cherokee, or the other Nations that held this belief, this would be totally foreign to Europeans. Besides mutual resentment, this right of blood vengeance fueled violence against settlers, as the death of any white would make up for the death of one of your family members murdered by another white. In time, as contact with Europeans became commonplace, the Cherokee adapted to this by substituting trade goods as justifying the slain, but this didn’t always work.
The Cherokee really entered the orbit of the colonies, particularly South Carolina, during the Yamasee War in 1715. The Yamasee were a tribe that lived along the mouth of the Savannah river, and were made up of remnants of tribes that had been destroyed by disease and warfare. They became the core of South Carolina’s army in their wars against other native tribes, including the Tuscarora. In 1715, another tribe was agitating for war against South Carolina and when a Carolinian delegation arrived to ask for help, the Yamasee murdered them in their sleep and launched a war of annihilation against South Carolina. This was driven by the Yamasee’s own fear of destruction. South Carolina, at the time, relied on Native American slaves — not African slaves, to maintain their plantations, and South Carolinians coveted Yamasee land, which just so happened to be on one of the most fertile places in the region. This lead to one of the bloodiest wars in American history when you look at the percentages of the population killed. During the war, seven percent of South Carolina’s population died and the Yamasee were wiped from the face of the earth. In a decade the Yamasee had either been killed, enslaved, or absorbed into a larger tribe. Every tribe in the southeast was involved in the war against South Carolina.
As a fun aside, when looking at American history its always good to check the psychology of the participants, and this event colors South Carolina’s psychology throughout its history. South Carolinians throughout history always seem overly paranoid of extinction. They were worried about native tribes wiping them out, then the Spanish, then the British, then slave uprisings, then Yankees wiping them out. There’s a persistence existential threat in the mind of South Carolinians for at least a hundred and fifty years, and this is its origin, because the population was almost pushed into the sea. So if South Carolina ever perceives a threat to their way of life, they don’t take that threat lightly.
This is where the Cherokee make their appearance. The Cherokee seized the opportunity to formally declare an alliance with South Carolina, effectively replacing both the Creek as the principle trade partner of the southern colonies and the Yamasee as their principle military ally. This permanently shifted the Creek to being an ally of whoever was the antagonistic colonial power in the south, first the French, then the Spanish, and then —ironically, the British.
This alliance was formally sealed and extended to the whole of the British Empire in 1730, when in a strange twist of fate, a delegation of Cherokee got on a boat and sailed to London. One of the leaders of the delegation was a man named Attakullakulla who spoke directly with his Britannic Majesty King George II.
Part 3: The Cords of Death Entangle Me
Dragging Canoe was young when he first wanted to go to war. The Cherokee were going to war with the Shawnee, a large tribe whose lands stretched across the mountains north of where the Cherokee lived. He wanted to fight for his people, but his father Attakullakulla refused him. After all, he was probably only 7 or 8. So first he hid in a canoe until some warriors found him. They took him out and brought him to his father, who then essentially said, “You can go to war when you can carry the canoe.” Not to be told no, he ran back and with all his might tried to lift the canoe up, but instead of carrying it, he dragged the canoe behind him through the muddy bank of the river. That is how Dragging Canoe got his name.
This war with the Shawnee was precipitated by a massive conflict that engulfed the entirety of eastern North America for the better part of a century as the Iroquois Confederacy pushed into the Ohio Valley, destroying and displacing thousands of towns, villages, and whole tribes. The Shawnee were refugees. They had been allowed to migrate south by the Cherokee and Chickasaws to act as buffers between themselves and other tribes.
Dragging Canoe’s whole world, and really even his life story, was set in motion before he was born, by the Beaver Wars. Fueled by astonishingly high demand for beaver fur, Iroquois, armed and supplied first by the Dutch, and then the British, pushed into the Ohio territory, claiming hunting grounds that stretched from modern day New York through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. This series of conflicts completely reshaped the balance of power in North America among both whites and natives. It is one of the longest and bloodiest wars in American history (notice a pattern?). The war however, was endemic of white colonial policy during the first 200 plus years of white settlement. Forging alliances with native tribes and confederacies helped to secure the flanks of very exposed colonies, in addition to creating a conduit of trade between the white and native peoples. The French and British colonies never adopted anything close to the encomienda system, like what existed in Spanish Americas, where the Spanish enslaved the native populations and forced them to work in plantation estates and mines, all under the auspices of “protecting them.” The closest was in Puritan New England, where the New Englanders constructed whole towns designed to “save their souls” by “teaching them about Jesus.” What really happened was cultural indoctrination, as saving natives really became about making them white.
Moving into the 1750s, the relationship between the colonies, their British overlords, and their native trade partners became more complicated, and inverted the basis behind their alliances. Trading in furs, particularly deerskin, became more lucrative, but what really drove economic interest for both the French and the British were the demand for European manufactured good in native territories. By the 1750s, tribes like the Cherokee became entirely dependent on European goods to survive. Traditional ways of life were disappearing. Basketweaving was being replaced by pottery, hunting and fighting by bow and war clubs were totally replaced by knives, steel hatchets, and rifles. The life of your civilization began to be measured by how much gunpowder you had. Subsistence agriculture still existed, but gunpowder determined if you could make war, make money, and eat for the winter. This drove Native Americans into frenzies to protect their hunting grounds, as they became the primary source of food and economic security. What exacerbated this was the fact that the American deer was being driven to the verge of extinction by this activity. However, by the 1750s, it was no longer just the natives who were hunting deer. Initially, tribes like the Iroquois and Cherokee had the advantage. They were the premiere military force on the continent, and maintaining good relations determined the success or failure of the colonial experiment.
White settlers in the south began to pour into the South Carolina backcountry after the Yamasee War, and as the rush for cheaper frontier land rose, so did the population, and by back country we are referring to the Piedmont region, which is half the state if you were to cut it from the north east to southwest. You don’t have to worry about it because Cherokee land is about to evaporate. The South Carolina and North Carolina “backcountry” is about to very quickly become just North and South Carolina. By the 1750s, the white population began to outnumber the native population, all while Native Americans relied more and more on European goods for survival. This became a huge deal, because as white settlers moved in, they began swallowing up hunting grounds, and actively hunting deer, which was the economic life blood of the many nations, particularly the Cherokee. South Carolina continued to attempt to maintain peaceful relations with the Cherokee, their principal native allies, and in order to do so signed treaties outlining the boundaries of native lands, which were quickly violated by frontier settlers. I’ve posted a map from the Smithsonian outlining the march of settlers on Cherokee territory on the site with this episode. It really helps to visualize the disintegration of Cherokee lands.
As tensions began to rise in the south between South Carolinians and the Cherokee, George Washington decided to start a world war in the Pennsylvania back country. Initially, it seems that this war would solve a majority of the problems on both sides. The Cherokee were necessary for the war effort, as the Creek nation in the south, the Shawnee in the Ohio Valley, and Huron in the north were French allies, only the tribes in the Cherokee and Iroquois orbit came together to help the colonies. The Cherokee, under Attakullakulla’s leadership, tried to use the war as a way to break out of South Carolina’s orbit and play the interests of Virginia against the Carolinas. It was hoped that they could receive the protection of colonial or British troops in Cherokee territory while their soldiers accompanied British and militia troops into the north to fight the French and their allies. In time, two forts were constructed in Cherokee territory, Fort Prince George and Fort Loudon. I’ll mark both of those on the map that will accompany this episode.
The problems were only papered over for the time being. The primary issue was the mutual distrust between the Cherokee and the British. It’s not like both sides lacked familiarity with the other. Each had knowledge of the various cultural institutions belonging to the other, the primary issue was the fact that neither side was willing to understand. Cherokee were routinely underpaid by the British and routinely characterized as untrustworthy mercenaries. This was because Cherokee insisted on receiving “gifts” from their British masters, a point that the British found irritating. They didn’t understand that these gifts were necessary to the survival of the Cherokee during this time, as the men couldn’t hunt. At the same time the value of said gifts were a third of the pay of a militiaman, which was also substantially less than a British regular. It was really pay more than a gift. Then the Cherokee couldn’t understand why the British couldn’t live up to their word, regarding their gift giving — which was often late, not at all, or not sufficient to their level of service — and especially regarding stopping settlers from squatting on Cherokee land and poaching their game. To the Cherokee, a oath was a great thing that could result in damnation if broken. It also was justification for reprisal.
Occasionally, as allied Cherokee war parties made their way back to their villages from campaigns in Virginia, Cherokee would raid homesteads of squatters, sometimes eradicating the entire family, sometimes only those who resisted. Sometimes they just stole horses, or money, or goods. These raids couldn’t be stopped by Attakullakulla because of the decentralized, democratic, and egalitarian nature of Cherokee society prevented the leverage necessary to endure their people to stop. British and Colonial leaders, and those traders who spent extended periods of time with the Cherokee, understood the nuances of Cherokee politics and diplomacy, but the newcomers on the frontier, and those living in the cities away from the frontier couldn’t conceive of ways outside of their own. Colonials couldn’t understand why the Cherokee leaders couldn’t keep their men from attacking frontier settlements, and eventually, this distrust between them spiraled into war.
A war party of Cherokee, led by a man named Moitoi of Settico, raided settlers up and down the Yadkin River. Men, women, and children were killed indiscriminately as reprisals for the perceived injustices of the British. South Carolina responded with a gunpowder embargo on the Cherokee. The Royal Governor of South Carolina, knowing this would either provoke or cow the Cherokee, raised the militia. The Cherokee sent a peace delegation, who were captured and held by the militia as hostages. It was at this point that the frontier devolved into chaos. The Cherokee tried to break out their peace delegation, and the garrison commander instead had them executed … because he thought that was a good idea? Oh, and then he turned his artillery on the Cherokee city of Keowee … yeah. South Carolina’s governor, I’m sure with images of the Yamasee war in his head, pleaded for military assistance. Almost 2000 British troops responded and marched into the Cherokee lower towns and burned several to the ground, including Keowee. The Cherokee marched a force to Echoee, and although they managed to force the British to withdraw, it was a classic Phyrric victory.
Meanwhile, in the north, the garrison at Ft Loudon surrendered, but only on the terms of leaving their arms, which included 12 cannons, rifles, gunpowder, etc. The only problem was the leader of the garrison didn’t want any of these things to fall into Cherokee hands. If they were able to use and transport these cannons then they could successfully assault British forts up and down the colonies. So, he ordered the cannonballs and gunpowder buried and the small arms thrown in the river. When the Cherokee discovered the subterfuge, they massacred the garrison on their way out of Cherokee country. One of the men, Captain John Stuart, was only saved by his Cherokee wife running into the battle to shield him. Eventually, the British were able to assure Cherokee submission by burning the lower towns and destroying their crops.
All of this context is important to understand, because this is where the cycle of violence between natives and the white settlers in the south starts. To the settlers the Cherokee, and other tribes, were duplicitous turncoats who would murder women and children and had no honor. You know, even though the British killed every Cherokee they captured regardless of age or gender. Essentially, they were savages that couldn’t be trusted.
Dragging Canoe saw all this happen. His father, Attakullakulla, was at the center of the action during the Anglo-Cherokee war. He was 21 by the beginning of the Anglo-Cherokee war, so I’m sure he fought in it, I just can’t find any record of where he fought, although if I had to bet, he would have been by his father’s side at Ft. Loudon. If Dragging Canoe had been by his father’s side during the war, it would have provided an object lesson for him in later years. Attakullakulla continuously tried to de-escalate the war at every turn. He was the one suing for peace after the gunpowder embargo. He then, promised to deliver the men responsible for the Yadkin River “massacres” in exchange for the Cherokee peace delegation that was being held hostage. He tried to get the hostages out of Ft Prince George, but eventually the Cherokee general Oconostota instigated the battle that got the hostages killed. Attakullakulla returned to Ft Loudon, outside his home of Chota. Attakullakulla knew these men. Some of them even had Cherokee wives and family in Chota. The entire reason for them being here was his. He was asked for the construction of the fort. Some of the men who built the fort lived in his home for a time. These people were his responsibility as much as anyones. So when Oconostota, the headman who had bungled the Ft Prince George job was going to use the same ruse to lure the men out of the fort (which was to ask for a conference under a flag of truce), Attakullakulla warned them not to fall for it. In returned, he was kicked out of Chota. After the massacre of the garrison, Attakullakulla actually bought the ransom on Captain Stuart. This would prove to be a wise investment in the future, as after the war, Stuart served as the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs until the Revolution.
However, if Dragging Canoe was by his father’s side, he would have seen how all of his talk of peace was for naught. All it got the Cherokee was death and famine. Time and time again he’d negotiate with the whites, and time and again they would take more land, burn more villages, and kill more of their people. They were a duplicitous band of turncoats who had no honor, and could not be trusted.
