Dragging Canoe (1730?-1792) was one of the greatest leaders of the Cherokee people. He was born sometime between 1730 and 1740 and was raised in a Cherokee village near the Tennessee and Little Tennessee rivers in what is now eastern Tennessee . He is remembered for working to ensure survival for his people during the difficult time of early contact with British settlers and through both political and armed resistance against the United States.
Dragging Canoe was the son, or possibly the adopted son, of Attakullakulla, an important leader among the Cherokee people. Dragging Canoe was also a cousin of the Cherokee peacemaker Nancy Ward . According to tradition, when Dragging Canoe was young, he wanted to join a war party that Attakullakulla was leading against the neighboring Shawnee . Attakullakulla would not permit him to come unless he could prove his worthiness by carrying a heavily loaded canoe to the water. Unable to carry the canoe, the determined young man dragged it instead. Warriors who witnessed this feat gave him the name Tsi-yu’gunsi’ni, or Dragging Canoe.
There are no known images of Dragging Canoe made during his lifetime. He was described as a man of great physical strength. His face was pockmarked from his having survived smallpox , a disease that killed many Cherokee. He married a woman named Nelly Pathkiller (also known as U’ga’lo’gv or Leaf), and the couple had six children. Dragging Canoe became a leader in one of the Cherokee towns on the Little Tennessee River.
In March 1775, Attakullakulla and a number of other Cherokee leaders negotiated a treaty with a group led by Richard Henderson, a British land speculator. The Cherokee agreed to cede (give up) most of what is now Kentucky and much of Tennessee to settlers in hopes of maintaining control over their remaining lands. Dragging Canoe denounced the treaty, and many young warriors supported him. He is said to have noted that other tribes who had relinquished their lands had “melted away like balls of snow before the sun…” and concluded, “Such treaties may be all right for men who are too old to hunt or fight. As for me, I have my young warriors about me.”
During the American Revolution (1775-1783), Dragging Canoe allied with the British, fighting American expansion into Cherokee ancestral lands. After American militia attacked the Cherokee towns, Attakullakulla and some of the other leaders tried to make treaties with the states, so that the Cherokee people could stay out of the war. However, Dragging Canoe and many young warriors moved to the area around Chickamauga Creek, near what is now Chattanooga , and kept fighting. They became known as the Chickamauga Cherokee. Other people opposed to the American rebels, including some from other Native American groups, joined them.
In the years after the war, Dragging Canoe led his followers in a series of conflicts known as the Chickamauga Wars, fought against encroaching American frontier settlers. In 1791, Cherokee chiefs signed the Treaty of Holston at White’s Fort in present-day Knoxville , Tennessee. The treaty was a proposal of peace between American settlers and the Cherokee people. Dragging Canoe and the other Chickamauga Cherokee rejected the treaty and maintained an alliance with the Spanish and British. Dragging Canoe visited the Creek chief Alexander McGillivray in an attempt to organize an alliance among Native American groups.
Dragging Canoe died on March 1, 1792, in Tennessee. At the time, he had successfully allied his tribe with neighboring Creek and Choctaw to fight American settlers entering Cherokee ancestral lands.
