Cherokee Power: Imperial and Indigenous Geopolitics in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670-1774

In 1754 South Carolina governor James Glen observed that the Tennessee River “has its rise in the Cherokee Nation and runs a great way through it.” While noting the “prodigious” extent of the corridor connecting the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys—and the Cherokees’ “undoubted” ownership of this watershed—Glen and other European observers were much less clear about the ambitions and claims of European empires and other Indigenous polities regarding the North American interior. In ...