Chickamauga Cherokee
Chickamauga Cherokee
The Chickamauga Cherokee, also known as the Lower Cherokee, were a band of Cherokee who supported Great Britain at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. Followers of the Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe, in the winter of 1776/1777, they moved with him down the Tennessee River away from the historic Overhill Cherokee towns. In this more isolated area, they established almost a dozen new towns to gain distance from colonists’ encroachment. The frontier people often referred to the people as “Chickamaugas,” after the name of the new town on the Chickamauga River where Dragging Canoe resided. After the Cherokee moved further west and southwest five years later, they were more commonly known as the “Lower Cherokee,” after the “Five Lower Towns,” whose people originally formed the new settlement. Neither they nor other Cherokee considered them separate from the 19th-century Cherokee people.
Chickamauga Cherokee External References
Followers of the Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe, in the winter of 1776/1777, they moved with him down the Tennessee River away from the historic Overhill Cherokee towns. In this more isolated area, they established almost a dozen new towns to gain distance from colonists' encroachment.
The Chickamauga Cherokee, also known as the Lower Cherokee, were a band of Cherokee who supported Great Britain at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War.
Very few historic markers are available to the public identifying these important historic Chickamauga Indian sites; the Chickamauga people consisted of the Lower Cherokee, Chickasaw, Upper Creek, Shawnee, Yuchi, Delaware, and many mixed bloods who fought to save their sacred hunting grounds on the Cumberland River and to prevent white encroachment in their homelands.