Cherokee History Timeline

Regular encounters between Cherokee communities and English colonists began during the mid-seventeenth century.

Image source: Cherokee

Around 1650, the Cherokee were estimated to number approximately 22,500 people. They lived mainly in independent towns and smaller villages along river valleys in the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Some historians have connected the Rechahecrians of the 1656 account with the Erie, an Iroquoian people displaced from the southern shore of Lake Erie during the Beaver Wars. Robert J. Conley and others later proposed that the Erie were identical to the Cherokee, although the claim lacks consensus.

Image source: Erie people

English settlers in Virginia Colony recorded that six or seven hundred people identified as Mahocks, Nahyssans, and Rechahecrians encamped at Bloody Run near present-day Richmond, creating a possible early Anglo-Cherokee contact.

Abraham Wood sent English traders James Needham and Gabriel Arthur from Fort Henry into Overhill Cherokee country west of the Appalachians.

In 1674, the Shawnee captured Gabriel Arthur and discovered that he was a white man.

In June 1674, the chief of Chota escorted Gabriel Arthur back to his English settlement in Virginia.

By the late seventeenth century, colonial traders from Virginia and Carolina were making regular journeys to Cherokee lands, although few written accounts of those trips survive.

Virginia colonists began trading with the Cherokee in the late seventeenth century.

By the eighteenth century, South Carolina had overtaken Virginia as the principal colonial trading partner of the Cherokee.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Cherokee were among the most populous and powerful southeastern Indian confederacies.

The English and Cherokee formed an alliance in the Southeast that remained strong for much of the eighteenth century.

In 1705, traders complained that they were losing business to the Indian slave trade, which was instigated and supported by South Carolina governor James Moore.

Allied with the English, the Cherokee and Chickasaw fought the French-allied Shawnee from 1710 to 1715 and forced the Shawnee to move north.

Image source: Beaver Wars

The Cherokee allied with the English, Yamasee, and Catawba in late 1712 and early 1713 against the Tuscarora during the Second Tuscarora War.

Image source: Tuscarora War

In January 1716, Cherokee warriors murdered a delegation of Muscogee Creek leaders visiting at Tugaloo, marking Cherokee entry into the Yamasee War.

The conflict ended in 1717 with peace treaties between South Carolina and the Creek.

In 1721, the Cherokee ceded lands to South Carolina.

By 1722, the Cherokee had been accepted as the sixth nation in the League of the Iroquois.

Image source: Iroquois

At Nikwasi in 1730, Sir Alexander Cuming persuaded the Cherokee to crown Moytoy of Tellico as emperor. Moytoy agreed to recognize King George II as the Cherokee protector.

In 1735, the Cherokee were estimated to have 64 towns and villages and approximately 6,000 fighting men.

Smallpox epidemics broke out among the Cherokee in 1738 and 1739. Lacking natural immunity to the newly introduced disease, Cherokee communities suffered severe effects.

Moytoy’s son Amo-sgasite attempted to succeed him as emperor in 1741, but the Cherokee instead elected Old Hop of Chota as their own leader.

Battles broke out from 1753 to 1755 between the Cherokee and Muscogee over disputed hunting grounds in North Georgia.

The Cherokee-Muscogee conflict culminated in the Battle of Taliwa in 1755 near present-day Ball Ground, Georgia, where the Cherokee defeated the Muscogee.

The Cherokee fought alongside the British in the French and Indian War in 1756, but serious misunderstandings quickly damaged the alliance.

Image source: French and Indian War

Strained relations between the Cherokee and British allies resulted in the Anglo-Cherokee War, beginning in 1760.

Image source: Anglo-Cherokee War

King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, forbidding British settlement west of the Appalachian crest in an attempt to protect the Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples from colonial encroachment.

Image source: Royal Proclamation of 1763

Predominantly Virginian settlers squatting on Cherokee lands in Tennessee formed the Watauga Association between 1769 and 1772.

Image source: Watauga Association

The settlement disputes and conflicts in the Ohio Valley helped spark Dunmore’s War, which lasted from 1773 to 1774.

In 1776, Cherokee forces allied with the Shawnee and led by Cornstalk attacked settlers in South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, the Washington District, and North Carolina.

Image source: Cherokee–American wars

In 1777, most surviving Cherokee town leaders signed treaties with the newly established states during the American Revolutionary War.