Oconostota was a warrior who rose to political prominence in the late 1750s. Born around 1707-1712, he first definitively appeared in the historical record in 1736 (he was not, as some have suggested, among the Cherokee delegation to London in 1730). He may have been a cousin of Attakullakulla and also related to Connecorte. As a young man, Oconostota was an accomplished warrior with suspected ties to the French. During a 1736 French visit to Overhill Cherokee towns, for instance, Oconostota welcomed the visitors by flying French flags. Tradition says Oconostota became the Great Warrior of Chota in 1738, effectively making him one of the most prestigious warrior among the Overhills, since Chota was the region’s most important town. In the 1750s, Oconostota’s role expanded; in addition to being the Great Warrior, he gained a seat on the Chota town council. Typically, a Cherokee man would transition to positions of political leadership after his military days were over. In his forties, Oconostota would continue in both roles, and by the mid-1750s, colonial officials regarded Old Hop and Oconostota as primarily responsible for ensuring the continued safety of Cherokee traders.
Oconostota’s loyalty to the British was almost assumed by colonial officials in the 1750s. A few years before his death, Old Hop told the British that Oconostota was one of the few leaders they could count on, because he consistently told his followers to love the British. Captains Raymond and Paul Demeré at Fort Loudoun echoed this evaluation, perhaps swayed by Old Hop’s praise of Oconostota.
William Richardson, who operated a short-lived Protestant mission among the Overhills in 1758, did not share this high opinion of Oconostota. Richardson consistently complained about Oconostota’s refusal to listen to his sermons and his delays in hearing Richardson’s requests for an audience with Chota’s leadership. Clearly aggravated at his mission’s failure, Richardson also recorded that Oconostota had the nerve to ask him for a new pair of boots. Neither opinion of Oconostota probably reflects the full truth; like many of his contemporaries, he was a savvy politician who kept his options open. While he certainly had sustained interactions with South Carolinians, he also sought an audience with Virginia in hopes of breaking the trade monopoly as early as 1754.
As his status as the Great Warrior suggests, Oconostota was known more for his actions than his words. During the 1750s, he led many successful raiding campaigns. In 1755 alone, he captured five French prisoners in an expedition to the Illinois-Wabash region and led five hundred warriors to victory against the Creeks at Taliwa, forcing them out of northern Georgia. He spent the next several years recruiting among Overhill and Middle Cherokees for warriors to go to the Virginia and Ohio frontiers, and his war parties took six French scalps and two prisoners in a mid-summer expedition against Fort Toulouse in Alabama. He also cooperated in a campaign on the Lower Ohio with Attakullakulla. He played a limited role in the 1758 Forbes campaign.
As tensions between Cherokee towns and Virginia and Carolina colonists heated up in fall 1758-1759, Oconostota maintained he knew nothing about other towns taking colonial prisoners and scalps. He was one of several dozen headmen who traveled to Charlestown in fall 1759 to try to negotiate peace with Governor William Henry Lyttelton.
Oconostota took a vocal role in those meetings with Lyttelton, arguing that the deaths and tension on the frontier were the fault of colonists, not Cherokees. In its report of the talks, the South Carolina Gazette took a highly skeptical tone, claiming Oconostota “pretended that they have been provoked to commit them, by the irregularities of some white People at the Fort,”1 referencing Charles Cunningham’s turning young Cherokees against Fort Loudoun by telling them that the fort would prevent trade; Tistoe of Keowee also referred to the rapes of Cherokee women by officers at Fort Prince George. Lyttelton did not respond well to the complaints of Cherokee leaders regarding the insults, trade problems, and miscommunications they brought up, instead telling Cherokee headmen that they were responsible for the tension introduced to the alliance and arguing that they wouldn’t even be talking to him if they were not running out of gunpowder. After a few days of negotiation, Lyttelton ended up taking the majority of the Cherokee headmen in Charlestown prisoner, bringing them to Fort Prince George for continued negotiations with other Cherokee headmen. Oconostota was among the hostages.
At Fort Prince George in December 1759, Lyttelton negotiated with another delegation of Cherokees, including Attakullakulla. He demanded Cherokees drive all French traders from their territory and hand over 24 Cherokees guilty of killing colonists. Oconostota, a hostage, argued that finding 24 men during hunting season would be difficult, if not impossible. In the end, the treaty with Lyttelton’s terms was signed by Cherokee headmen, including Attakullakulla and Oconostota, who was then released while roughly two dozen other headmen remained hostages. Lyttleton’s army left the fort, driven away by a smallpox epidemic in the nearby town of Keowee.
In January 1760, Oconostota’s position in Chota gained more prominence when Connecorte died, and Oconostota was instrumental in getting Standing Turkey appointed as his successor in Chota’s governance. He gained even more attention for his continued military prowess in February, when he led a surprise attack on Fort Prince George on February 16. Seeking to rescue the hostages inside, Oconostota attacked, leading to the death of the fort’s commander Richard Coytmore. In the midst of the ensuing chaos, the fort’s garrison massacred the hostages; in reports afterwards, second-in-command Alexander Miln claimed the killings took place only after the Cherokee prisoners tried to attack with hidden weapons. Miln also claimed the prisoners had attempted to poison the fort’s well. The murder of the Cherokee headmen catapulted the region into open warfare.
Oconostota’s military operations continued through 1760, with attacks on Archibald Montgomery’s Highlanders near Etchoe. Montgomery returned to Charlestown after that battle, convinced that his campaign had properly punished the Cherokees. Oconostota then turned his full attention to besieging Fort Loudoun through the late spring and summer of 1760, attacking stragglers from the fort and starving the garrison out. In early August, the fort’s leadership met with Oconostota to arrange surrender terms. On August 10, a day after the fort’s surrender, Cherokees attacked the garrison on their march to Fort Prince George, killing roughly two dozen people (an equal number to the massacred prisoners of Fort Prince George). Oconostota does not appear to have been directly involved, though he almost certainly knew of and approved the attack.
Oconostota then turned his efforts towards negotiating an end to the war, raising a British flag at Nequassee and sending talks to Lieutenant Governor William Bull and offering to exchange prisoners. He also traveled to the French Fort de l’Assumption near the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers and on to New Orleans in winter 1760-1761, receiving a military commission but not the military aid he might have hoped for. Oconostota returned to Cherokee territory in time to engage in several encounters with James Grant’s Highlanders, back for the second summer in Cherokee territory, with the most notable battle occurring near Cowhee on June 10. A month later, Oconostota sent word that he had “buried the hatchet” and was “desirous of straitning the Path, of washing away the Blood which stained it.”2 Oconostota continued as a prominent negotiating headmen through 1761, though he was not a part of the final treaty negotiations.
After the war, Oconostota continued as a prominent headmen, occupying both military and political positions. He received a unique honor in 1773, when Superintendent for Indian Affairs John Stuart (a survivor of the Fort Loudoun surrender), sponsored his membership in the prestigious St. Andrews Society in Charlestown, the only Cherokee headman to have that honor, in 1773. Oconostota died sometime in 1782-1783.3
- 27 October-1 November 1759, South Carolina Gazette ↩︎
- Christopher French, “Journal of an Expedition to South Carolina,” The Journal of Cherokee Studies 2.3 (1977): 290; James C. Kelly, “Oconostota,” The Journal of Cherokee Studies 3.4 (1978): 226-227. ↩︎
- Kelly, “Oconostota,” 221-227; Duane H. King, “Oconastota,” in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 436; William Richardson, “William Richardson Diary,” held in South Caroliniana Library (University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC); Thomas A. Strohfeldt, “Warriours in Williamsburg: The Cherokee Presence in Virginia’s Eighteenth-Century Capital,” The Journal of Cherokee Studies 11.1 (1986): 12. ↩︎