Chatuga (Cherokee town)

Chatuga (Cherokee: ᏣᏚᎦ, romanized Tsatugi; also spelled Chatugee, Chattooga, Chattoogee) was the name of two distinct Cherokee settlements. One was an Overhill Cherokee town on the Tellico River in present-day Polk County, Tennessee; the other was a Lower Towns settlement near the headwaters of the Coosa River in present-day Floyd County, Georgia. The name Tsatugi may derive from a Creek word; one proposed translation is "he has crossed the stream and come out upon the other side," though the etymology remains uncertain.^[1][2]

The Overhill Chatuga was situated on the Tellico River at the site of present-day Tellico Plains in Polk County, Tennessee.^[3] It was a sister town of Great Tellico, and the two were the most frequently identified settlements on the Tellico River.^[4] When the Province of Carolina first began trading with the Cherokee in the late seventeenth century, their westernmost contacts were at these twin towns.^{[5][circular reference]} Some scholars have speculated that Great Tellico and Chatuga formed a single community with two districts and two separate governments, though the precise nature of their relationship is uncertain.^[4]

In the early eighteenth century, Great Tellico served as the de facto capital of the Overhill Cherokee, and Chatuga shared in this prominence. The Cherokee leader Moytoy, who was given the title "Emperor of the Cherokee" by the British envoy Sir Alexander Cuming in 1730, came from the Great Tellico–Chatuga area.^{[6][circular reference]} After Moytoy's death in 1741, the political center of the Overhill Cherokee shifted northward to Chota and Tanasi on the Little Tennessee River, and both Great Tellico and Chatuga declined in regional influence.^[4]

Like other Overhill towns, Chatuga maintained the dual governance structure typical of Cherokee communities. Each town had a white (peace) government led by a peace chief, responsible for domestic affairs and ceremonial life, and a red (war) government led by a war chief, responsible for military decisions and external relations. Public business was conducted in a council house, an octagonal structure that could measure up to sixty feet in diameter, situated at one end of a village plaza.^[7][4]

The Overhill settlements suffered repeated destruction during the Cherokee–American wars of the late eighteenth century, as colonial and territorial militia campaigns targeted Cherokee towns throughout the region.^[4] By the early nineteenth century, the Overhill Cherokee population had consolidated around fewer settlements. In the Treaty of 1819 (also called the Calhoun Treaty or Hiwassee Purchase), the Cherokee ceded the land between the Little Tennessee River and the Hiwassee River, transferring the sites of the Overhill settlements—including Chatuga—to the United States.^[4][8] The treaty also provided for individual Cherokee to retain residence on 640-acre reservations within the ceded territory.^[8]

The Lower Towns Chatuga was situated near the confluence of the Etowah River and the Oostanaula River, which join to form the Coosa River, at present-day Rome in Floyd County, Georgia. The Cherokee called this area "Head of Coosa" (Cherokee: ᎡᏙᏩ, Etowa).^[9][10] The settlement was established during the late eighteenth century, in the period of the Cherokee–American wars (1776–1794), when displaced Cherokee from the Lower Towns and Chickamauga Cherokee communities resettled in the upper Coosa drainage.^{[11][circular reference]} The town occupied a border zone between the Lower Cherokee and the Creek Nation.^[10]

Benjamin Hawkins, the United States Indian agent for the southern tribes, traveled through the region in 1798–1799. His journals described Cherokee agricultural communities in the Coosa headwaters with cultivated fields along the river bottomlands.^[12]

In the summer of 1776, Colonel Andrew Williamson led approximately 1,100 South Carolina militia against the Cherokee Lower Towns in retaliation for Cherokee raids on the Carolina frontier. Williamson's forces destroyed more than thirty Cherokee settlements, including Seneca, Keowee, Estatoe, Tugaloo, and Sugar Town, burning homes and food stores.^{[13][14][circular reference]} Williamson then joined forces with North Carolina General Griffith Rutherford's troops to devastate the Middle Towns and Valley Towns.^[15] More than fifty Cherokee towns were destroyed across the campaign, leaving thousands of Cherokee without food or shelter.^[13]

The destruction prompted the Treaty of Dewitt's Corner in May 1777, in which the Lower Cherokee ceded nearly all their remaining lands in South Carolina to the colonial government.^[16]

After the wars, Chatuga was rebuilt and grew into one of the more prominent Cherokee settlements in northwest Georgia. By the early nineteenth century, several Cherokee national leaders had established plantations near the Head of Coosa. John Ross, who would serve as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1827 to 1866, built a home and ferry operation at the confluence of the Oostanaula and Etowah rivers around 1827.^[17] Major Ridge, an older and influential Cherokee leader, had settled near the same location as early as the 1790s and developed a plantation with approximately thirty enslaved African American laborers.^{[18][circular reference]} The area served as a center of Cherokee political life until removal.

Following passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the Georgia legislature moved to claim Cherokee territory. In 1832, the state divided the former Cherokee lands into new counties through the Cherokee Land Lottery, with Floyd County carved from the original Cherokee County.^[19] More than two thousand Floyd County land lots were distributed to white Georgian citizens by lottery. The city of Rome was founded in 1834 on the former Cherokee settlement site at the Head of Coosa.^[9]

After the signing of the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, the United States government committed to removing the Cherokee from their southeastern homelands. In the spring of 1838, federal troops and state militia began the forced roundup of Cherokee people across north Georgia. Floyd County contained two detention facilities: Camp Scott, located in what is now downtown Rome and staffed by 150 Georgia militia, and Fort Means, located near Kingston.^[20] In May 1838, approximately seventy Cherokee were arrested in the Rome vicinity and confined at Camp Scott before being transferred to holding camps in eastern Tennessee. Fort Means processed 467 Cherokee prisoners who were moved to Ross's Landing for the journey west.^[20][21]

A third Cherokee settlement bearing a similar name, Chattooga Town (also Tsatugi), was a small Lower Town located on the Chattooga River in present-day Oconee County, South Carolina. A 1721 British census listed "Chattoogie" as the smallest of the Lower Towns, with only ninety inhabitants.^[22] Archaeological excavations at the site in 1993 recovered evidence of Cherokee occupation from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, including remains of a council house, pavilions, and storage structures.^[23] The Chattooga Town site was abandoned by the Cherokee around the 1740s and is distinct from both the Overhill and Lower Towns Chatuga settlements described above.^[22]

The Chattooga River, which forms part of the border between Georgia and South Carolina, takes its name from the Cherokee word Tsatugi.^[2] The river was designated a National Wild and Scenic River in 1974.^[24] The Bandy Heritage Center in Dalton, Georgia, maintains a Trail of Tears driving tour that includes sites in Floyd County associated with Cherokee removal from the Head of Coosa area.^[25]

• Cherokee–American wars
• Cherokee removal
• Great Tellico
• Historic Cherokee settlements
• Overhill Cherokee
• Trail of Tears

• Swanton, John R. (1952). The Indian Tribes of North America. Smithsonian Institution. pp. 215–220.
• Greene, Lance K. (1996). The Archaeology and History of the Cherokee Out Towns (M.A. thesis). University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
• Hill, Sarah H. (2017). "All Roads Led from Rome: Facing the History of Cherokee Expulsion". Southern Spaces. Retrieved February 25, 2026.
• Rodning, Christopher B. (2011). "Cherokee Townhouses: Architectural Adaptation to European Contact in the Southern Appalachians". North American Archaeologist. 32 (2): 131–160. doi:10.2190/NA.32.2.b.