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While the majority of the young Cherokee warriors were among their enemies, their chief battles were fought with those from the Chickamaugan towns on the Tennessee River, under the leadership of Dragging Canoe.
Having driven Stuart into Charleston, Sevier and his active Wataugans returned home, now perhaps looking forward to a rest, which they had surely earned. Once more, however, they were hailed with alarming news. Dragging Canoe had come to life again and was emerging from the caves of the Tennessee with a substantial force of Chickamaugan warriors.
The somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of the brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief, Dragging Canoe, warrior and seer and hater of white men, who urges his tribesmen against the sale and, when they will not hearken, springs from their midst into the clear space before Henderson and his band of pioneers and, pointing with uplifted arm, warns them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white man covets which to the red man has long been a bloody ground. *
In all his "thirty-five battles" it is said he lost not more than fifty men. The Cherokees made peace in 1777, after about a year of almost continuous warfare, the treaty being concluded on their side by the old chiefs who had never countenanced the war. Dragging Canoe refused to take part, but he was rendered innocuous for the time being by the destruction of several of the Chickamaugan villages.
About the same time Henry Stuart set out from Pensacola with another consignment from the British. His report to Lord Germain of his arrival in the Chickamaugan towns and of what took place there just prior to the raids on the Tennessee settlements is one of the most illuminating as well as one of the most dramatic papers in the collected records of that time. *
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