Chickamauga Cherokee

The Chickamauga Cherokee (also known as Chickamuagans) are a Native American group who separated from the Cherokee in March 1775 (at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War) to the early 1800s, when elderly chiefs sold more than 22 million square acres of their hunting grounds. Most of the Cherokee people who lived on the Atlantic seaboard surrounded by settlers signed peace treaties with the Americans in 1776-1777, after the Second Cherokee War. Followers of the skiagusta (war chief) Dragging Canoe who lived on the landward side of the Appalachian continental divide in proximity to Muscogees (formerly known as Creeks) moved with him down the Tennessee River, away from their historic Overhill Cherokee towns. Relocated to a more isolated area, they established 11 new towns to distance themselves from encroaching colonists.

While frontier Americans associated Dragging Canoe and his band with their new town on Chickamauga Creek, and began to refer to the band as the Chickamaugas, Wilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, referred to them as Chickamaugans, rather than Chickamaugas. The Chickamauga moved further west and southwest into present-day Alabama five years later, establishing five larger settlements. They were then more commonly known as the Lower Cherokee, a term closely associated with the people of the five lower towns.

Dragging Canoe, the first Chicamauga chief, separated from the Upper Cherokee and accused the elderly chiefs of endangering the survival of their people. He never met with whites to negotiate a treaty again.