page_title: Cherokee–American wars
section_title: Visit from the northern tribes
hierarchical_section_title: Cherokee–American wars / Revolutionary War phase: Cherokee War of 1776 / Visit from the northern tribes
context_page_description: 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 1795 between the Cherokee and American settlers on the frontier. Most of the events took place in the Upper South. While the fighting stretched across the entire period, there were extended periods with of little or no action.
  The Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe, whom some historians call "the Savage Napoleon", and his warriors, and other Cherokee fought alongside and together with warriors from several other tribes, most often the Muscogee in the Old Southwest and the Shawnee in the Old Northwest. During the Revolutionary War, they also fought alongside British troops, Loyalist militia, and the King's Carolina Rangers against the rebel colonists, hoping to expel them from their territory.
  Open warfare broke out in the summer of 1776 along the frontier of the Watauga, Holston, Nolichucky, and Doe rivers in East Tennessee, as well as the colonies of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
context_section_description: In May 1776, partly at the behest of Henry Hamilton, the British governor in Detroit, the Shawnee chief Cornstalk led a delegation from the northern tribes (Shawnee, Lenape, Iroquois, Ottawa, others) to the southern tribes. He traveled to Chota to meet with the southern tribes (Cherokee, Muscogee, Chickasaw, Choctaw) about fighting with the British against their common enemy. Cornstalk called for united action against those they called the "Long Knives", the squatters who settled and remained in Kain-tuck-ee, or, as the settlers called it, Transylvania. At the close of his speech, Cornstalk offered his war belt, and Dragging Canoe accepted it. Dragging Canoe also accepted belts from the Ottawa and the Iroquois.
  To prepare themselves for the coming campaign, the Overhill Cherokee began raiding into Kentucky, often with the Shawnee. Before the northern delegation had left, Dragging Canoe led a small war party into Kentucky and returned with four scalps to present to Cornstalk before they departed. In another raid, a war party led by Hanging Maw, captured three teenage settler girls, Jemima Boone and Elizabeth and Frances Callaway, on July 14 but lost them three days later to a rescue party led by Daniel Boone, father of Jemima, and Richard Callaway, father of Elizabeth and Frances.
caption: The Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians by Charles Ferdinand Wimar (1853)
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