Bloody Footprints 75stormed through Cherokee territory.49 William Henry Drayton, a
leader of the Anglo separatists from Charleston, had met with the
Cherokees in 1775. After the Cherokee attack that prompted the
separatists' 1776 scorched-earth campaign, he recommended that
"the nation be extirpated, and the lands become the property of the
public. For my part, I shall never give my voice for a peace with the
Cherokee Nation upon any other terms than their removal beyond
the mountains."5^0 As Cherokees fled, abandoning their towns and
fields, the soldiers seized, killed, and scalped women and children,
taking no prisoners. 51
In mid-1780, eighty Virginia separatist settler-rangers attacked
the Shawnees in southern Ohio and spent a month destroying and
looting their towns and fields. At the same time, the Cherokee Nation
regained momentum in its resistance, raiding squatters' settlements
within its territory. In retaliation, North Carolina sent five hundred
mounted rangers to burn Cherokee towns, with orders to "chas
tise that nation and reduce them to obedience." During the win
ter of 1780-81, the separatist seven-hundred-man Virginia militia
wreaked destruction again in the Cherokee Nation. On Christmas
Day, the militia commander wrote to Thomas Jefferson, then a Vir
ginia delegate to the Continental Congress, that a detachment had
"surprised a party of Indians, [and taken] one scalp, and Seventeen
Horses loaded with clothing and skins and House furnishings"-a
clear sign that these were noncombatant refugees trying to flee. The
commander also reported that his forces had thus far destroyed the
principal Cherokee towns of Chote, Scittigo, Chilhowee To gue, Mi
cliqua, Kai-a-tee, Sattoogo, Telico, Hiwassee, and Chistowee, along
with several smaller villages.
All told, more than a thousand homes had been laid waste, and
some fifty thousand bushels of corn and other provisions either
burned or looted.52 At this point, the Virginia and North Carolina
separatist authorities pooled their manpower and materiel and orga
nized a force that effected a broad sweep of annihilation through the
Cherokee towns, driving residents out into present-day middle Ten
nessee and northern Alabama, where they exterminated Indigenous
families and burned down the towns in that area too.
Throughout the war between separatist settlers and the forces of