Chickamauga Indian

The Chickamauga Cherokee were a group that separated from the greater body of the Cherokee tribes during the American Revolution. The majority of the Cherokee people wished to make peace with the American rebels near the end of 1776 following several military setbacks and the reprisals that followed. The Chickamauga followers of headman, Dragging Canoe, moved with him down the Tennessee River away from their historic Overhill Cherokee towns in the winter of 1776–1777. Relocated in a more isolated area, they established eleven new towns in order to gain distance from colonists' encroachments. The frontier Americans associated Dragging Canoe and his band with their new town on the Chickamauga Creek, and began to refer to them as the Chickamaugas. Five years later, the Cherokee once more moved further west and southwest into what is now called Alabama, establishing five larger settlements. They were then more commonly known as the Lower Cherokee. This term was closely associated with the people of these "Five Lower Towns".

In the winter of 1776–1777, Cherokee followers of Dragging Canoe, who had supported the British at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, moved down the Tennessee River and away from their historic Overhill Cherokee towns. They established nearly a dozen new towns in this frontier area in an attempt to gain distance from encroaching European-American settlers.

Dragging Canoe and his followers settled at the place where the Great Indian Warpath crossed the Chickamauga Creek, near present-day Chattanooga, Tennessee. They named their town Chickamauga after the stream. The entire adjacent region was referred to in general as the Chickamauga area. American settlers adopted that term to refer to the militant Cherokee in this area as "Chickamaugas." In 1782, militia forces under John Sevier and William Campbell destroyed the eleven Cherokee towns. Dragging Canoe once again led his people further down the Tennessee River, establishing five new, Lower Cherokee towns.

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