Chickamauga Cherokee

The Chickamauga Cherokee is a Native American group who separated from the Cherokee from the American Revolutionary War to the early 1800s. Most of the Cherokee people signed peace treaties with the Americans in 1776-1777, after the Second Cherokee War. Followers of the skiagusta (war chief) Dragging Canoe 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.

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. 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. Division among the Cherokee is indicated by a May 4, 1808 letter from Thomas Jefferson to the "Chiefs of the Upper Cherokee" in which he says, "You propose My Children, that your Nation shall be divided into two and that your part the Upper Cherokees, shall be separated from the lower by a fixed boundary, shall be placed under the Government of the U.S. become citizens thereof, and be ruled by our laws; in fine, to be our brothers instead of our children."