In March 1775, Richard Henderson and the Transylvania Company negotiated with Cherokee elders at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River, purchasing 20 million acres of Cherokee land in present-day Tennessee and Kentucky in exchange for trade goods. Tsiyu Gansini, known as Dragging Canoe, refused to sign. He warned what would follow. His warning, and the decade-long war that proved him right, are documented in the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina at Documenting the American South.
The meeting at Sycamore Shoals in March 1775 was a land transaction, not a treaty of equals. The Transylvania Company, organized by North Carolina judge and land speculator Richard Henderson, sought title to a vast territory for the purpose of establishing a new proprietary colony. Cherokee elders, facing economic pressure and the weight of accumulated debts to colonial traders, agreed to the sale. Dragging Canoe opposed it from the start.
We had hoped that the white men would not be willing to travel beyond the mountains. Now that hope is gone. They have passed the mountains, and have settled upon Cherokee land. They wish to have that usurpation sanctioned by treaty. When that is gained, the same encroaching spirit will lead them upon other land of the Cherokees. New cessions will be asked. Finally the whole country, which the Cherokees and their fathers have so long occupied, will be demanded.
He told Henderson that the settlers would find the land dark and bloody. He refused to sign the treaty. Most younger Cherokee warriors sided with him. With 700 to 1,000 men he established new towns along Chickamauga Creek in the winter of 1776 to 1777. This community became known as the Chickamauga Cherokee, a distinct group that would continue fighting American expansion for more than a decade after the Revolution formally ended.
In July 1776, the same month the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, Cherokee warriors launched coordinated attacks on frontier settlements across the Carolinas and Virginia. Dragging Canoe led the Chickamauga forces. The colonial response was swift and overwhelming. Militias from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia converged on Cherokee territory that summer and fall, burning more than thirty towns and destroying the food stores that sustained the population through winter.
Dragging Canoe survived the campaign. He rebuilt. He established new towns farther down the Tennessee River, beyond the reach of the colonial militia columns. The Cherokee national council, exhausted by the war, made peace in 1777. Dragging Canoe did not. He continued fighting, raiding frontier settlements and seeking alliances with other Native nations who faced the same pressures, until his death in 1792. He died the night after celebrating a new alliance, having danced until exhaustion.
He complained to British agents that his people were almost surrounded by the White People, that they had but a small spot of ground left for them to stand upon, and that it seemed to be the Intention of the White People to destroy them from being a people.
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