DRAGGING CANOE
(Tsiyu Gunsini)
His negative predictions were tragically prescient.
Prior to whites settling in America, various Indian tribes had a long history of fierce fighting for control of Kentucky. The Transylvania Land company negotiated for the “rights” to Kentucky. Dragging Canoe, who opposed the treaty, argued that the land had a bad history and would be very difficult to settle. Poet Theodore O’Hara described Kentuckians as “Sons of the Dark and Bloody Ground” in his poem, The Bivouac of the Dead.
Dragging Canoe (ᏥᏳ ᎦᏅᏏᏂ, pronounced Tsiyu Gansini,[a] c. 1738 – February 29, 1792) was a Cherokee red (or war) chief who led a band of Cherokee warriors who resisted colonists and United States settlers in the Upper South. During the American Revolution and afterward, Dragging Canoe's forces were sometimes joined by Upper Muskogee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Indians from other tribes, along with British Loyalists, and agents of France and Spain. The Cherokee American Wars lasted more than a decade after the end of the American Revolutionary War. During that time, Dragging Canoe became the preeminent war leader among the Indians of the southeast. He served as war chief, or skiagusta, of the group known as the Chickamauga Cherokee (or "Lower Cherokee"), from 1777 until his death in 1792.
