Chickamauga (tribe)

From Freepedia

The Chickamauga (also Chikamaka) are an American Indian people related to the Cherokee people. The Chickamauga split off from the Cherokee in the late eighteenth century in a dispute over continued accommodation of encroachment by white settlers, despite repeated violations of treaty agreements.

The Cherokee were already resentful of white settlers after the Iroquois ceded Cherokee land in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768. In 1775, North Carolina's Richard Henderson laid claim to 27,000 square miles of Cherokee territory between the Cumberland and Kentucky rivers, claiming that Attakullakulla ("Little Carpenter") and other chiefs had sold the land for ten thousand pounds worth of trade goods. Some of the chiefs later swore that they had been deceived, but agreed to uphold the cession.

Attakullakulla's son, Dragging Canoe, broke with his father and led a group of younger warriors in an attack on squatters living on the ceded land. They caused great terror among the settlers, but being unsupported by the powerful Creek nation to their south, and cut off from British trading sources, they soon ran short of ammunition. In the summer of 1776, pusued by 6,000 militiamen, they were driven south along the Chicamauga and Tennessee rivers, where they settled and regained strength, only to be ravaged by a smallpox epidemic in 1778.

In 1778–79 when Savannah and Augusta, Georgia were captured by the British, they supplied Dragging Canoe's band with guns and ammunition, and together they were able to gain control of parts of interior South Carolina and Georgia. In 1779, Virginia launched a counterattack, destroying eleven Cherokee towns and most of their food supply. Dragging Canoe responded with punitive raids, which led to Governor Thomas Jefferson sending an expedition of seven hundred Virginians and North Carolinians against him in December, 1780. Although charged to scupulously observe the distinction between accomodationist and militant Cherokees, the force, led by Arthur Campbell and John Sevier became anxious as they approached the Chicamauga towns, and turned, instead, on the friendly Cherokee, claiming that they were wolves in sheeps clothing. They burned seventeen neutral towns and destroyed 50,000 bushels of corn, killed 29 men, most of whom offered no resistance, and took 17 prisoners.

After the Revolution, Dragging Canoe turned to the Spanish for support, attacking settlements in the Carolinas in 1784 and 1785. By the time of his death in 1792, the resistance of the Chikamaka had led to some grudging respect from the settlers, and the Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse in 1794, while ceding yet more land, led to a period of relative peace in the 19th century.

The descendants of Dragging Canoe's band of people call themselves the Chikamaka. This group, whose homelands are located in what is now middle Tennessee, say that the spelling they use has been documented in historical papers produced by the Moravian missionaries who came to their region in the late eighteenth century. Chikamaka is a derivative from the word for a boiling or seething pot. This describes the attitude of a people who had endured enough and had reached the boiling point, demanding that their rights be upheld, forcibly if necessary. The Chikamaka people continue to live, work and raise their families in their historic homeland in middle Tennessee.