Overmountain Men - The Overmountain Settlements

The Overmountain Settlements

In the late 1760s and early 1770s, Euro-American settlers began pouring into what is now northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia, causing considerable agitation among the Cherokees and other tribes who controlled the area. The Treaty of Lochaber, signed in 1770 between the British and the Cherokee, moved the boundary of British territory south to Long Island of the Holston (modern Kingsport, Tennessee). While this brought settlements north of the Holston under British protection, the settlers south of the river were ordered to leave.

Rather than comply with the Crown's order, the illegal settlers —mostly concentrated at the Watauga settlement at Sycamore Shoals (in present day Elizabethton), the Nolichucky settlement (near modern Greeneville), and Carter's Valley (near modern Kingsport) —decided to lease their land from the Cherokee, and in 1772 established the Watauga Association, which was the first independent American constitutional government west of the Appalachians. In 1775, the Watauga and Nolichucky settlers purchased their leased lands outright and formed the independent Washington District. They almost immediately petitioned Virginia for annexation, which was denied.

The Crown and the colonial governments (especially Virginia) considered the land purchases illegal, and ordered the settlers to leave what they considered to be Cherokee lands. Also, some factions of the Cherokee became agitated when these settlements began expanding rapidly, and tribal chiefs amiable to the settlers fell out of favor. A young Cherokee chief, Dragging Canoe, who had been opposed to the sale of tribal lands, called for the violent removal of all European settlers west of the mountains. He led an estimated one thousand followers (eventually referred to as the Chickamauga) away from the American settlements and carried on an armed struggle against the new country for almost twenty more years (see the Chickamauga Wars) after the failed Cherokee attacks against the Overmountain settlements in the summer of 1776.