With the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754, the Cherokee were sought out as allies by the British. They eventually took part in campaigns against the French-held Fort Duquesne (present day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) and their allies the Shawnee of the Ohio Country. In exchange for the participation of Cherokee warriors, the British agreed to build two forts to protect the Cherokee women, children and towns from the retaliation of the French and their Indian allies. The forts built by South Carolina were Fort Prince George, near Keowee on the Savannah River in the Lower Towns and Fort Loudoun, near the Cherokee town of Chota, where the Little Tennessee River and Tellico River converged, by the Overhill Towns in what is now Tennessee. A third fort, built by Virginia across the Little Tennessee River near Chota, was left unmanned.[4]
Ostenaco, a Cherokee leader, took 100 warriors in the depths of winter in February 1756 to join Major Andrew Lewis, who commanded 200 Virginia Provincial troops. After six weeks, the expedition was out of supplies and had eaten their horses. The Cherokee, irritated by the performance of the Provincials, decided to begin walking back toward Chota. The following year, some Cherokee warriors joined a British army, which was being put together in Pennsylvania under British General John Forbes. The expedition, which included British regular troops, Provincials from North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania, along with Catawba, Tuscarora, and a few Creek and Chickasaw warriors, was intended to force the French from their major fortification in western Pennsylvania, Fort Duquesne.
The Forbes campaign was plagued with logistical problems. As the British had promised goods to the various Indian warriors for their assistance but fell short, many warriors began leaving by June 1758. The British promised to provide goods to the warriors traveling home, many of whom were accompanied by their families. The warriors were told they could obtain provisions at forts located along their way back to their homelands. On their return, the Cherokee took some stray horses in Virginia to replace those they had lost. Virginia settlers got angry and banded together, pursuing the Cherokee, attacking them and killing, scalping and mutilating 20 of the Indians. They later collected a bounty offered by the Virginian colonial government on enemy scalps.[5] Although Dinwiddie, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, apologized, some Virginians considered the Cherokee to be horse thieves. Some Cherokee and Amo-adawehi, the Moytoy of Citico, retaliated for the murders of the Cherokee at the hands of their colonial allies.
The situation worsened, as 14 Cherokee hostages were killed at Fort Prince George near Keowee by the garrison during a failed attempt to move them. The Cherokee later attacked Fort Loudoun, and hostilities continued into 1761. The Cherokee were led by Standing Turkey, Aganstata (Oconostota) of Chota, Attakullakulla (Atagulgalu) of Tanasi, Ostenaco of Tomotley, Wauhatchie (Wayatsi) of the Lower Towns, and Round O of the Middle Towns. The Cherokee sought allies among the other Indian tribes and help from the French, but they received no practical aid and faced the British colonials alone. The new governor of South Carolina, William Henry Lyttelton, had declared war on the Cherokee in 1759.[6] The governor embargoed all shipments of gunpowder to the Cherokee and raised an army of 1,100 provincial troops, along with an artillery company under Christopher Gadsden, which marched to confront the Cherokee Lower Towns. Desperate for ammunition for their fall and winter hunts, which sustained their survival, the Cherokee sent a peace delegation of moderate chiefs to negotiate.
The thirty-two chiefs were taken prisoner and, escorted by the provincial army, were taken [7] to Fort Prince George. There they were held in a room large enough to hold only six people.[8] Lyttelton released three of the chiefs, thinking this would ensure peace. Lyttelton returned to Charleston, but the Cherokee retaliated by attacking frontier settlements into 1760. In February 1760, they attacked Fort Prince George in an effort to rescue their hostages. The fort's commander was killed, and his replacement ordered the remaining 14 hostages to be moved, which resulted in a confrontation that saw the garrison kill the hostages. The Cherokee also attacked Fort Ninety Six, but it withstood the siege. They besieged Fort Loudoun; and several lesser posts in the South Carolina back-country quickly fell to Cherokee raids. Lyttelton appealed for help to Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander in North America. Amherst sent Archibald Montgomerie with an army of 1,300 to 1,500 troops to South Carolina.[9] They included 400 in four companies of the Royal Scots[10] and a 700-man battalion of the Montgomerie's Highlanders. His second in command was Major James Grant. The regulars were joined by some 300 mounted Carolina rangers, in seven troops, and 100 militia, as well a party of 40 to 50 Catawba warriors, longtime competitors with the Cherokee.[11]
The expedition was intended to subdue the Cherokee by razing their towns and crops, while relieving those posts besieged by the Cherokee, in particular, Fort Loudoun. In late May the British had reached Fort Ninety-Six. Montgomerie's campaign razed some of the Cherokee Lower Towns, including Keowee, Estatoe and Sugar Town, killing or capturing around 100 Indians. He relieved Fort Prince George, offering to parley with the Cherokee. But most of the warriors, having retreated to the Middle Towns, were no longer willing to negotiate. Montgomerie waited ten days before preparing to march on the Middle Towns, some sixty miles northeast. His forces had to travel over very difficult terrain, both mountainous and forested. He had to leave behind his wagon transport, which could not move beyond the Lower Towns, and use improvised panniers and packsaddles for the horses of the baggage train.
At some five miles from Etchoe, the lowest town in the Cherokee's middle settlements, Montgomerie's advanced guard of a company of Rangers was ambushed in a deep valley. Captain Morrison and a number of his Rangers were killed. Many of the Cherokee were armed with rifles which had a longer and more accurate range than the muskets of the British.[12] While accounts say the Cherokee took aimed shots, the British blazed away with ineffective platoon fire. Indian accounts told of the British standing in 'heaps' and being shot down like turkeys. The Rangers especially performed badly, with Lieutenant Grant reporting that some fifty deserted before the march, and the rest ran off when Morrison was killed.[13]
The Grenadier and the Light infantry companies moved forward to support the Rangers, while the Royal Scots came forward on rising ground to the right of the Cherokee. The Royal Scots were thrown back into open ground by heavy rifle fire. They had to reform and fight off the Cherokee counter-attack. Montgomerie extended his line on the left with the Highlanders, who turned the Indian right. The Indians retired from this advance and came into contact with the Royal Scots in a brisk encounter. They retreated to a position on a hill from which they could not be dislodged. Montgomerie ordered an advance through the pass and on to the town, but some of the Cherokee ran to warn the inhabitants to leave. Some of the warriors had got around Montgomerie's flanks and attacked his pack animals and supply train, whose loss would cripple the army. This attack was eventually driven off.[14]
Montgomerie had numerous seriously wounded men whom he could not leave behind, whether he advanced or retreated. Many of the pack animals were lost, further crippling his progress.[15] He had to abandon the advance, along with a large quantity of supplies, in order to provide pack horses to transport the wounded to safety. The British force retreated to Fort Prince George. Montgomerie turned over supplies to the fort and left his most badly wounded. He continued his withdrawal to Charleston. While his expedition was partially successful in destroying the Cherokee Lower Towns and relieving Fort Prince George, he was forced to withdraw at the Middle Towns, and failed to relieve Fort Loudoun in Overhill country. By August he and his men sailed back to New York.
The failure to relieve Fort Loudon forced the garrison to surrender. The Cherokee allowed Captain Demeré and the garrison to retain their arms and enough ammunition to make the trip back to the South Carolina colony, provided they left the remaining arms and stores of ammunition to the Cherokee led by Ostenaco. The garrison marched out of the fort on August 9, with a Cherokee escort. When the Cherokee entered the fort, they found 10 bags of powder and ball buried, and the cannon and small arms thrown in the river to prevent their use. Angered by the broken agreement, the Cherokee went after the garrison.[16] The next morning the escort had drifted off, and the garrison was attacked in the woods by perhaps 700 Indians.[17] Some 22 soldiers, roughly equal to the number of Cherokee chief hostages killed at Fort Prince George, and 3 civilians were killed, and 120 taken prisoner. Residents of Charleston were panicked when they learned of these events. The British and Cherokee made a truce of six months, but failed to agree on peace.
After a difficult winter, due to the loss of the Lower Towns' harvest and shortage of ammunition for hunting, as well as disease, Cherokee morale still remained high. But, Amherst had determined to launch a greater invasion of the Cherokee lands "to chastise the Cherokees [and] reduce them to the absolute necessity of suing for pardon,". James Grant commanded more regulars: the 1st, 17th and 22nd Regiments, a war-party of Mohawk and Stockbridge Indian scouts, Catawba and Chickasaw warriors; a large number of provincials under Colonel Middleton, and rangers. The provincials included men who would gain fame during the American Revolution: William Moultrie, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Francis Marion (known as the Swamp Fox). Grant's force was more than 2,800 strong.[18] They were prepared for an extended campaign in the mountain and forest terrain, having a supply train a mile long, made up of 600 packhorses carrying a month's provisions, and a large herd of cattle managed by a few score enslaved African Americans.[citation needed]
Grant encountered 1,000 Cherokee warriors on June 10, 1761, near the site of the previous battle of Echoee. The Indians again ambushed the column, and concentrated on killing the pack animals. After six hours of long-range skirmishing, the Cherokee exhausted their limited ammunition and withdrew. Grant's force attacked and burned the fifteen Middle Towns, and all their crops. Grant expressly ordered the troops to summarily execute any Indian man, woman or child they captured. Although, by July, Grant had marched his men to exhaustion, and had 300 too sick to walk, he had wrecked the Cherokee economy. Some 4,000 residents of the Middle Towns were left homeless and starving. In August 1761 the Cherokee sued for peace.[19] As a result of the war, Cherokee warrior strength, estimated at 5,000 before the war in 1739,[20] was reduced by battle, smallpox and starvation to 2,300.[21]
Related Research Articles
Chota is a historic Overhill Cherokee town site in Monroe County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. Developing after nearby Tanasi, Chota was the most important of the Overhill towns from the late 1740s until 1788. It replaced Tanasi as the de facto capital, or 'mother town' of the Cherokee people.
The Cherokee Path was the primary route of English and Scots traders from Charleston to Columbia, South Carolina in Colonial America. It was the way they reached Cherokee towns and territories along the upper Keowee River and its tributaries. In its lower section it was known as the Savannah River. They referred to these towns along the Keowee and Tugaloo rivers as the Lower Towns, in contrast to the Middle Towns in Western North Carolina and the Overhill Towns in present-day southeastern Tennessee west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Fort Loudoun was a British fort located in what is now Monroe County, Tennessee. Constructed from 1756 until 1757 to help garner Cherokee support for the British at the outset of the French and Indian War, the fort was one of the first significant British outposts west of the Appalachian Mountains. The fort was designed by John William Gerard de Brahm, while its construction was supervised by Captain Raymond Demeré; the fort's garrison was commanded by Demeré's brother, Paul Demeré. It was named for the Earl of Loudoun, the commander of British forces in North America at the time.
The Anglo-Cherokee War, was also known from the Anglo-European perspective as the Cherokee War, the Cherokee Uprising, or the Cherokee Rebellion. The war was a conflict between British forces in North America and Cherokee bands during the French and Indian War.
Oconostota was a Cherokee skiagusta of Chota, which was for nearly four decades the primary town in the Overhill territory, and within what is now Monroe County, Tennessee. He served as the First Beloved Man of Chota from 1775 to 1781.
Attakullakulla was an influential Cherokee leader and the tribe's First Beloved Man, serving from 1761 to around 1775. His son was Dragging Canoe, the first leader of the Chickamauga faction of the Cherokee tribes.
Keowee was a Cherokee town in the far northwest corner of present-day South Carolina. It was the principal town of what were called the seven Lower Towns, located along the Keowee River. Keowee was situated on the Lower Cherokee Traders' Path, part of the Upper Road through the Piedmont. In 1752 the Cherokee established New Keowee Town nearby, off the traders' path but in a more defensible location.
The Cherokee–American wars, also known as the Chickamauga Wars, were a series of raids, campaigns, ambushes, minor skirmishes, and several full-scale frontier battles in the Old Southwest from 1776 to 1794 between the Cherokee and American settlers on the frontier. Most of the events took place in the Upper South region. While the fighting stretched across the entire period, there were extended periods with little or no action.
The Tellico Blockhouse was an early American outpost located along the Little Tennessee River in what developed as Vonore, Monroe County, Tennessee. Completed in 1794, the blockhouse was a US military outpost that operated until 1807; the garrison was intended to keep peace between the nearby Overhill Cherokee towns and encroaching early Euro-American pioneers in the area in the wake of the Cherokee–American wars.
Overhill Cherokee was the term for the Cherokee people located in their historic settlements in what is now the U.S. state of Tennessee in the Southeastern United States, on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains. This name was used by 18th-century European traders and explorers from British colonies along the Atlantic coast, as they had to cross the mountains to reach these settlements.
Henry Timberlake was a colonial Anglo-American officer, journalist, and cartographer. He was born in the Colony of Virginia and died in England. He is best known for his work as an emissary from the British colonies to the Overhill Cherokee during the 1761–1762 Timberlake Expedition.
Tomotley is a prehistoric and historic Native American site along the lower Little Tennessee River in Monroe County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. Occupied as early as the Archaic period, the Tomotley site was occupied particularly during the Mississippian period, which was likely when its earthwork platform mounds were built. It was also occupied during the eighteenth century as a Cherokee town. It revealed an unexpected style: an octagonal townhouse and square or rectangular residences. In the Overhill period, Cherokee townhouses found in the Carolinas in the same period were circular in design, with,
Conocotocko, also known by the folk-etymologized name Cunne Shote, was First Beloved Man of the Cherokee from 1760. He succeeded his uncle Conocotocko I upon the latter's death. Pro-French like his uncle, he steered the Cherokee into war with the British colonies of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia in the aftermath of the execution of several Cherokee leaders who were being held hostage at Fort Prince George. He held his title until the end of the Anglo-Cherokee War in 1761, when he was deposed in favor of Attakullakulla.
The Cherokee people of the southeastern United States, and later Oklahoma and surrounding areas, have a long military history. Since European contact, Cherokee military activity has been documented in European records. Cherokee tribes and bands had a number of conflicts during the 18th century with Europeans, primarily British colonists from the Southern Colonies. The Eastern Band and Cherokees from the Indian Territory fought in the American Civil War, with bands allying with the Union or the Confederacy. Because many Cherokees allied with the Confederacy, the United States government required a new treaty with the nation after the war. Cherokees have also served in the United States military during the 20th and 21st centuries.
Cherokee history is the written and oral lore, traditions, and historical record maintained by the living Cherokee people and their ancestors. In the 21st century, leaders of the Cherokee people define themselves as those persons enrolled in one of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes: The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, The Cherokee Nation, and The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians.
The siege of Fort Loudoun was an engagement during the Anglo-Cherokee War fought from February 1760 to August 1760 between the warriors of the Cherokee led by Ostenaco and the garrison of Fort Loudoun composed of British and colonial soldiers commanded by Captain Paul Demeré.
Fort Dobbs was an 18th-century fort in the Yadkin–Pee Dee River Basin region of the Province of North Carolina, near what is now Statesville in Iredell County. Used for frontier defense during and after the French and Indian War, the fort was built to protect the American settlers of the western frontier of North Carolina, and served as a vital outpost for soldiers. Fort Dobbs' primary structure was a blockhouse with log walls, surrounded by a shallow ditch, and by 1759, a palisade. It was intended to provide protection from French-allied Native Americans such as the Shawnee raids into western North Carolina.
Provincial troops were military units raised by colonial governors and legislatures in British North America for extended operations during the French and Indian Wars. The provincial troops differed from the militia, in that they were a full-time military organization conducting extended operations. They differed from the regular British Army in that they were recruited only for one campaign season at the time. These forces were often recruited through a quota system applied to the militia. Officers were appointed by the provincial governments. During the eighteenth century militia service was increasingly seen as a prerogative of the social and economic well-established, while provincial troops came to be recruited from different and less deep-rooted members of the community.
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The historic Cherokee settlements were Cherokee settlements established in Southeastern North America up to the removals of the early 19th century. Several settlements had existed prior to and were initially contacted by explorers and colonists of the colonial powers as they made inroads into frontier areas. Others were established later.
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