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That part of Tennessee which is now Hamilton County was once occupied by Cherokee Indians. The best authorities, including Mooney, consider the Cherokees a branch of the great family of Iroquois who were called the Goths and Vandals of America because of their far
reaching conquests and decisive victories. It cannot be stated with any authority, however, just when the division of the Cherokees from the Iroquois took place.
About the year 1670, approximately one hundred years prior to the settlement of Tennessee by white men, the Shawnees were defeated and driven north through Kentucky into Ohio. The Iroquois tradition is that they, the Iroquois, were the Indians who defeated the Shawnees and expelled them from Tennessee.
The Shawnees themselves, however, state that it was the Cherokees, acting in combination with the Chickasaws, who defeated them and forced them to migrate. The Cherokees and the Chickasaws make the same statement.
The actual Cherokee domain reached from the Blue Ridge of Virginia southward to the present site of Rome, Ga., including all the mountainous section of West North Carolina and East Tennessee.
In addition, the Cherokees claimed as their hunting ground Middle Tennessee and Kentucky. The Shawnees and Chickasaws disputed the Cherokee claim in part. Residence in the section—Kentucky and Middle Tennessee—was so hazardous because of these conflicting claims, that the territory was permanently unoccupied by any Indians after the Shawnee expulsion.
The first cession of land took place in 1721. Governor Nicholson of South Carolina called a conference at Charleston, after many complaints had reached him of traders abusing the hospitality of the Indians by capturing them and sending them to the West Indies as slaves.
At this conference a treaty establishing a boundary line was agreed upon; a chief was designated to represent the Nation in dealing with the Government, and a cession of land was granted. This was the first of many cessions. Slowly at first, but ever faster, the white people claimed new and wider territory.
In 1730 North Carolina arranged a conference and treaty to decide boundaries. This treaty provided that the Cherokees should trade with no nation save Great Britain and allow no other nation to build forts or cabins or to plant corn among them. A cession of land was made.
Year after year, conference after conference was held, always with the same result. It is impossible to enumerate in this record all the treaties and cessions of land.
The white and red men vied with each other during this period in awful atrocities of bloody border warfare. This led to massacres even years after the Revolution. As late as 1795, the massacres on the Cumberland and its tributaries form terrible chapters in Tennessee history.
The section which is now Hamilton County in some measure escaped the massacres for the reason that it was not then settled by white people; but it is a mistake to conclude that it had no part in the warfare.
As a matter of fact its history is of peculiar interest in its relation to the State of Tennessee and the entire country. It was British headquarters for many years, and the center for the distribution of great quantities of goods and ammunition among the Indians. It was also headquarters for the great Chief Dragging Canoe and his followers, the Chickamauga's, who by their activities delayed the settlement of lower East Tennessee for many years.
It was from the valleys along the streams of Hamilton County and vicinity that the warriors went forth. They caused two-thirds of all the horrors of Indian warfare visited upon the settlements on Holston, Watauga, and Cumberland, for a period of nearly twenty years.
The Indians, incited by the British, were on the warpath against the Americans. Dragging Canoe commanded the most important division. He was defeated in the battle of Long Island Flats in July, 1776. Col. William Christian raised troops and invaded the Cherokee country.
The Cherokee towns along the Little Tennessee River were destroyed and the Indians sued for peace. But not Dragging Canoe! Withdrawing from the Cherokee Council he removed with his followers to the Tennessee Valley on the banks of the Chickamauga Creek, now in Hamilton County, where he joined the Chickamaugas and established the fame of the tribe destined to be associated with his name.
Just when the Chickamauga Indians first wandered to the Tennessee Valley is not known. Their forbears, the "Chitimaucas," lived in the lower Mississippi Valley. Certainly a few chiefs and some members of the tribe had long been settled on Chickamauga Creek when Dragging Canoe seceded from the Cherokee Nation and joined them. Thereafter they were a strong and independent tribe.
The Chickamaugas moved farther down the river and established the Five Lower Towns:
They thought these habitations impregnable.
In 1794, Joseph Brown, a white boy who had been a captive among the Chickamaugas at Running Water, led an expedition commanded by Major James Ore, down Battle Creek across the Tennessee River, near the present site of South Pittsburg, and destroyed the towns of Running Water and Nickajack.
This was the end of the Chickamaugas as a separate tribe. They sued for peace and rejoined the Cherokee Council.
Every defeat in battle was followed by a treaty and a cession of land.
In 1798 a treaty guaranteed the Cherokees the "remainder of their lands forever"; but the signatures were scarcely dry when the white people demanded more land!
History
of Hamilton County
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