In the early years of the American Revolution, war in the northern theater raged in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. The southern theater looked far different. From Virginia to Georgia, newly elected Revolutionary governments and self-styled Patriots looked west at the trans-Appalachian region, hoping to finally traverse the stern border the British had set. The only problem was that the land was already inhabited. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee—to name the most prominent—had inhabited the land for centuries, and didn’t exactly welcome Anglo-American settlement.
Conflict between American settlers/revolutionaries and the Cherokee nation erupted in the early years of the Revolution. This conflict is particularly interesting when viewed from the perspective of the Cherokee, especially two of their most prominent leaders, Dragging Canoe and Nancy Ward (or Nan-ye-hi in Cherokee).
Brief Introduction to the Conflict
The tensions that eventually boiled over into the Cherokee-American War went back decades, if not longer. Following the French and Indian War, the British government issued a Royal Proclamation that set a boundary line, called the “Indian Boundary,” that prohibited American settlers from crossing into the Appalachian and trans-Appalachian regions. To American settlers, this was a slap in the face. The French crown had ceded vast swaths of territory to Britain that its citizens were now barred from inhabiting. As part of the laws surrounding this proclamation, the British government recognized the right of Native nations to drive white settlers from their territory and would even send troops of their own to rout out trespassers.[1]
Nevertheless, American colonists persisted in crossing into Cherokee territory. Unsurprisingly, these actions only took a tense situation from bad to worse. People from up and down the Cherokee Nation became increasingly incensed as white settlers continued to settle on their hunting grounds, chipping away at their borders and way of life with each new farmstead.
The most famous of these settlements was Watauga. In 1769 in what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee, British colonists rented a huge tract of land from a Cherokee noble who agreed to the terms without the consent of the Cherokee powers that were.[2] For the next five years, the governments of Virginia and North Carolina continued to declare Watauga illegal, but the settlers did not move.[3]
Then, in 1774, a North Carolina land speculator named Richard Henderson negotiated with the Cherokees. The result was the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, in which Henderson claimed the Cherokee not only ceded the land upon which Watauga was built, but “all of their hunting grounds south of the Ohio and Kentucky Rivers and north of the Cumberland River.” Basically, Henderson claimed the Cherokee had ceded all of what would become Kentucky and Middle Tennessee.[4]