A Brief and Brutal Story of the White Men’s Betrayal of the Cherokee in Kentucky

A Brief and Brutal Story of the White Men’s Betrayal of the Cherokee in Kentucky

            Entrepreneur and colonial judge Richard Henderson, his agent Daniel Boone, and other private citizens met with Cherokee Chiefs along the Watauga River on March 17, 1775. Henderson and Boone illegally negotiated the cession of all of the land in between the Kentucky, Ohio, and Cumberland rivers to the privately owned Transylvania Company. Although it has become known as the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, the entire event was in direct violation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. On behalf of England, the colony of Virginia, which then included Kentucky, revoked the treaty. However, it did not stop Boone and the Transylvania Company from creating the Wilderness Road, which opened the way for an unstoppable and limitless flow of European immigrants into Kentucky and in direct conflict with the Cherokee.

 

The Treaty of Sycamore Shoals was negotiated just one month before the beginning of the American Revolution. Most, but not all, of the Cherokee supported the British through the war and beyond to 1794. Following the example of the Delaware Chief Coquetakeghton (White Eyes), who served as a guide and lieutenant colonel in the American army, a number of Cherokee living in Kentucky agreed to serve as scouts. At the decisive Battle of Kings Mountain, October 7, 1780, there were Cherokee warriors from Kentucky fighting on both sides.

 

By 1782, individual Cherokee political alliances had become extremely complex. Some traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, to seek protection from the Spanish government, while others moved north and joined the Shawnee on the Scioto River, getting supplies and council from the British military. At the same time, representatives of the Wyandot, Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi traveled to the Cumberland River valley to council with the Cherokee about joining them in an all-out war against the United States.

 

The American Revolution ended on September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The Cherokee were not consulted and many did not recognize England's cession of Kentucky to the United States. To make matters worse, a group of Tennessee colonists illegally created the State of Franklin with John Sevier as their Governor. On May 31, 1785, Major Hugh Henry, Sevier, and other representatives of the self-declared state met with Cherokee Chiefs to negotiate the "Treaty of Dumplin Creek," which promised to redefine and extend the Cherokee boundary line. Because the United States government did not recognize the State of Franklin (1785-1788), the Treaty of Dumplin Creek was deemed illegal. Sevier and his Franklinites engendered a spirit of distrust between all subsequent treaty-makers and the Cherokee, which led to many bloody conflicts and, ultimately, genocide in Kentucky………………………………..

 

In 1810, the "War Hawks" were elected to Congress. They expressed their concern about the "Indian presence" in the East, and on January 15, 1810, they extinguished all Cherokee land claims in southern Kentucky. Although Chief Red Bird made every possible concession to maintain peace between his people and the United States, most of the white settlers made no distinction between them and the Chickamauga supporting Tecumseh  On January 31, 1811, just months after the false and misleading information of mass killings at the  Yahoo Falls massacre, the surrounding Chickamauga lands were granted for sale at the minimal price of ten cents an acre in order to encourage the development of salt works. (The businessmen wanted the salt works, so they created a story of a fictitious 'Massacre")..As salt was an expensive commodity at $25.00 a barrel, the local white settlers who orchestrated the terrible falsehood of  Yahoo Falls massacre purchased the land containing salt springs and became rich.

 

The white settlers' hatred of Red Bird and his people grew, in part, out of their indifference between the Chickamauga who fought with the Shawnee in the Northwest Territory against Kentucky troops at Fallen Timbers, Tippecanoe, and the River Raisin, and Cherokee who fought alongside American forces in the Southeast against the Creek at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It was this ignorance and arrogance that led to the murder of Chief Red Bird and his crippled friend Jack in Clay County. They were brutally attacked in their sleep by a party of white hunters in the river bottom, just above the mouth of Hector's Creek, on the west side of the Red Bird River, directly across from its confluence with Jack's Creek where Chief Red Bird's cabin was located. An angry young man in the party that had lost his father, some say at the Yahoo Falls massacre, mutilated Chief Red Bird and Jack with their own tomahawks. The murderers threw the bodies of Red Bird and Jack into a place called "Willie's Hole," and stole their belongings. Not long after the crime, Red Bird's longtime friend, John Gilbert, discovered the slaughtered bodies. The angry young man, said to have had an odd surname, returned to the scene just as John Gilbert was pulling the bodies ashore. Together, they buried the elder Cherokee in the sandy floor of a nearby rock shelter.

 

After Red Bird's murder, remnants of his people lived along Little Goose Creek, in Clay County, which was the dividing line between the Cherokee and white settlers until the end of the Trail of Tears in 1839. Some of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears escaped and secretly joined their extended families in Clay County. Since then, the Cherokee people of Kentucky have suffered genocide and today they are subjected to ethnocide. Ironically, outside of the reserve lands in North Carolina and Oklahoma, there are more people of Cherokee descent in Kentucky than any other state.

 

One grandson said, "This was the year the notorious half-breed Cherokee Chief Benge . . .," but Benge went on the path of War because John Sevier and his followers had murdered his family. Benge came to Wallins Creek in Harlan County where his brother Joseph was living as a white-man. Benge wanted his brother to join him, but he refused.