Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Attakullakulla of Chota
Attakullakulla, remembered in English records as the Little Carpenter, stood at the center of Cherokee diplomacy during one of the most dangerous periods in the southern Appalachian frontier. His world reached from the Overhill Cherokee towns on the Little Tennessee River to Charleston, Williamsburg, Augusta, London, and the contested hunting lands beyond the mountains.
He was not simply a man who signed treaties. He was a political builder, a speaker, a negotiator, and a survivor who spent much of his life trying to hold Cherokee towns together while British colonies pressed against them from every side. His name appears in treaty records, colonial letters, Henry Timberlake’s memoir, and later histories because he kept returning to the same hard question: how could the Cherokee protect their towns, trade, hunting grounds, and people in a world crowded by rival empires and hungry settlers?
The Overhill Towns And Chota
Attakullakulla belonged to the Overhill Cherokee world of present eastern Tennessee, then part of a much larger Cherokee homeland that crossed what are now Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia. His home is often connected with Tuskegee, or Toskegee, on the Little Tennessee River near Chota. Henry Timberlake’s 1765 map of the Overhill settlements listed “Toskegee” with “Attakullakulla Governor,” while also showing the network of towns that made up the Overhill country.
Chota mattered because it was more than a village. By the mid eighteenth century, it had become the leading Overhill Cherokee town, recognized by both Cherokee people and Europeans as a center of military power, political authority, and economic influence. The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes Chota as the Cherokee capital by that period and names Attakullakulla among the leaders associated with it, along with Old Hop, Oconostota, Standing Turkey, Old Tassel, and Hanging Maw.
That is why calling Attakullakulla “of Chota” makes sense, even though some records tie his household more specifically to nearby Tuskegee. Chota was the beloved town, the place where peace talks carried special meaning. In the 1763 Fort Augusta records, Attakullakulla himself is recorded saying that “Choti is the beloved Town” and that good talks should be remembered and the path kept straight.
The Man Called Little Carpenter
The name Attakullakulla appears in many spellings, including Attacullaculla and Atagulkalu. English speakers called him the Little Carpenter. Timberlake explained that Cherokee people had common names and that English speakers often added names from a person’s character or actions. He wrote that “the Little Carpenter” was given to Attakullakulla because he excelled in building houses.
Later writers have treated the name as a symbol of diplomacy. A carpenter fits pieces together, and Attakullakulla spent decades trying to make political pieces fit: Overhill interests, British trade, colonial governors, Cherokee war leaders, younger warriors, and the constant pressure of settlers. The image can be too neat if taken too far, but it survives because it captures something true about the way he appears in the records. He was a builder of agreements, and he understood that agreements could be as fragile as any wooden frame.
NCpedia identifies him as a Cherokee diplomat, warrior, and statesman, born around 1700 and dead by about 1780. The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes him as one of the most powerful Overhill Cherokee leaders of the eighteenth century, especially in relations with South Carolina and Virginia, while also noting that he may never have held the formal title of Uko, or foremost chief, in Cherokee society.
A Young Man In London
Attakullakulla first enters the written colonial record through the 1730 Cherokee embassy to England. Seven Cherokee men traveled with Sir Alexander Cuming and appeared before King George II. The British Museum preserves the well-known 1730 print of the delegation, describing seven Cherokees in European dress, armed and posed in a woodland setting, with the print connected to Cuming’s mission and the Cherokee visit to Windsor.
The University of Georgia’s Hargrett Library also preserves a 1730 engraving in the De Renne collection. Its description says the Cherokee leaders were brought from Carolina by Sir Alexander Cuming to enter into “Articles of Friendship and Commerce” with the king.
Modern scholars warn that the printed names on these images do not always map neatly onto later standardized names. Still, the embassy matters. Colonial Williamsburg notes that Attakullakulla later spoke of that trip as a source of prestige and as an experience that taught him about the scale and character of the British Empire.
That journey did not make him a British subject in the simple sense English officials wanted. It gave him knowledge. It showed him the power Britain could display, but also gave him a diplomatic memory he could use when speaking to governors decades later.
Between Britain, France, And The Cherokee Towns
After his return from England, Attakullakulla lived through the violent imperial struggle that remade the Appalachian frontier. Accounts differ in naming his northern captors, with NCpedia describing a 1739 capture by Caughnawaga, or Canadian Iroquois, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia describing captivity among the Ottawas of eastern Canada from about 1743 to 1748. Both accounts agree that his time in the north gave him direct experience with French influence.
That mattered because Cherokee diplomacy did not happen in a vacuum. Britain, France, South Carolina, Virginia, Native nations, traders, and frontier settlers all competed for influence. Attakullakulla learned to use that competition. NCpedia describes how he pushed for better trade terms, tried to weaken South Carolina’s trade monopoly, and sought Virginia trade when South Carolina policies endangered Cherokee interests.
To British officials, he could appear either loyal or troublesome depending on the moment. To Cherokee people, the problem was more immediate. Trade goods, guns, ammunition, cloth, and metal tools were tied to survival, hunting, diplomacy, and war. Colonial Williamsburg notes that Cherokee leaders complained about inflated prices, poor trade practices, and the power traders held when there was too little competition.
Attakullakulla’s diplomacy was not abstract. It was about whether women had to travel long distances for small necessities, whether traders were honest, whether hunting could continue, and whether young men would be pushed toward war.
Fort Loudoun And The War Years
In the 1750s, the Cherokee alliance with Britain grew tense and then broke. British colonies wanted Cherokee help against the French, but Cherokee warriors moving through colonial territory faced violence, insult, and retaliation. Forts promised protection, but they also marked deeper British involvement in Cherokee country.
Fort Loudoun was built near Chota in the late 1750s after long diplomatic pressure and colonial promises. At first, it represented alliance and trade. Soon it became a symbol of mistrust. During the Anglo-Cherokee War, the Overhill towns captured Fort Loudoun in 1760. In the violence that followed, Attakullakulla became known in British records for rescuing Captain John Stuart, who later became British superintendent of southern Indian affairs. NCpedia records that after Fort Loudoun’s capture and the killing of officers, Attakullakulla saved Stuart and sent him toward Virginia.
This story should not be read as simple pro-British loyalty. Attakullakulla’s actions fit his larger pattern. He often tried to keep channels open, even after violence. In a world where one killing could trigger another, saving a diplomatic contact could be a political act.
After British armies devastated Cherokee country, Oconostota called on Attakullakulla to help make peace. NCpedia credits Attakullakulla with effecting the peace in December 1761.
Timberlake’s Window Into Cherokee Country
Henry Timberlake’s memoir remains one of the most important English-language primary sources for the Overhill Cherokee towns after the Anglo-Cherokee War. Timberlake entered the Cherokee country after the 1761 peace and described towns, ceremonies, politics, travel, and the uneasy process of restoring relations.
His account is still filtered through an English colonial officer’s eyes, but it places readers close to the Overhill world in which Attakullakulla worked. Timberlake called Chote the “metropolis of the country” when describing a gathering in its townhouse to hear peace articles read.
Timberlake also shows how dangerous rumor and communication could be. News moved by runners, speeches, councils, and uncertain reports. A false story could shift a town toward war. A delayed messenger could create fear. A trader’s behavior could become a diplomatic crisis. Attakullakulla’s influence depended on navigating that world of speeches, beads, belts, promises, and suspicion.
Speaking At Fort Augusta
One of the strongest primary records for Attakullakulla’s diplomatic voice comes from the 1763 Fort Augusta congress, preserved in the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina. Governors, officials, and representatives of several Native nations gathered to discuss peace, trade, boundaries, and future relations. The records place Attakullakulla among the Overhill Cherokee delegation.
At Fort Augusta, he spoke as the Little Carpenter and emphasized memory, peace, trade, and limits on white settlement. He said the talks between the governors and Cherokee people should be remembered and the path kept straight. He also asked for traders to be sent to his town because Keowee was far away and carrying deerskins over the mountains was hard work.
That request reveals the material side of diplomacy. Trade was not merely profit. It shaped daily life. It shaped women’s labor. It shaped hunting. It shaped whether peace could last. Attakullakulla wanted traders, but he wanted “good Traders” rather than disorderly men who caused trouble.
He also drew a line. White settlers already beyond the Long Canes could stay, he said, but they must go no farther. The lands toward Virginia must not be settled too near the Cherokee because hunting was their trade and their way of living.
That was the heart of the matter. British officials wanted peace, but settlers wanted land. Cherokee leaders could agree to a boundary, but boundaries kept moving.
Boundary Lines And Land Pressure
After the Seven Years’ War, British officials tried to draw formal boundaries between colonial settlement and Native homelands. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was supposed to limit western settlement, but colonists and land speculators kept pressing for more.
The Treaty of Hard Labor in 1768 confirmed a southern boundary between British colonies and the Cherokee Nation. Encyclopedia Virginia explains that the treaty was negotiated by John Stuart and Cherokee representatives as part of an effort to settle the line between Virginia and Cherokee land, but later negotiations pushed that line farther west.
The Treaty of Lochaber in 1770 moved the line again. NCpedia states that Attakullakulla attended the Lochaber conference and that during the later survey he altered the line westward along the east bank of the Kentucky River, a change that became controversial.
These land deals damaged his standing. From one angle, Attakullakulla was trying to make the best of a disaster by legalizing what seemed unstoppable and preventing wider war. From another angle, younger Cherokee warriors saw the same agreements as surrender. Both views help explain the split that came next.
Sycamore Shoals And Dragging Canoe
In March 1775, Richard Henderson and the Transylvania Company negotiated the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, also called the Transylvania Purchase. ANCHOR describes it as one of the largest private land transactions in United States history, involving about twenty million acres in present Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. About 1,200 Cherokee people attended, with representatives including Attakullakulla, Dragging Canoe, Oconostata, and Old Tassel.
The treaty was deeply controversial. The goods offered in return looked large on paper, but when divided among Cherokee people they were far less than the land’s hunting value. ANCHOR notes that many Cherokee leaders disputed the terms and legality, and that resistance to the treaty was strong.
Dragging Canoe, Attakullakulla’s son, rejected the sale and became a leading voice of armed resistance. The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s treaty overview says Dragging Canoe refused to recognize the sale and warned that Middle Tennessee would become a “dark and bloody ground.”
The disagreement between father and son was more than a family divide. It represented a generational and strategic break inside Cherokee politics. Attakullakulla had spent his life using diplomacy to preserve as much as possible. Dragging Canoe believed that diplomacy had given away too much.
Revolution And The End Of An Era
The American Revolution made Attakullakulla’s old diplomatic strategy harder to sustain. Before the Revolution, he could sometimes use British, French, South Carolina, and Virginia rivalries against one another. After independence began, settler power became more unified and more aggressive.
In 1776, war between Cherokee forces and frontier settlements brought destructive retaliation from Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. NCpedia records that many Cherokee towns were destroyed and that Attakullakulla and Oconostota later made peace overtures to the Americans, resulting in the Treaty of Fort Patrick Henry in April 1777, where Cherokee leaders agreed to neutrality in the conflict between Britain and the Americans.
Colonial Williamsburg describes the 1777 negotiations as Attakullakulla’s last major act as a statesman. It also notes that the date of his death, like his birth, is uncertain, and that he probably died around the early 1780s. NCpedia gives a slightly earlier ending, saying his final recorded efforts failed and that he died shortly afterward.
However the date is fixed, the meaning is clear. Attakullakulla died as the diplomatic world he knew was collapsing. The old paths to Charleston and Williamsburg no longer offered the same possibilities. The Cherokee homeland faced a new United States, continued settler expansion, and a long era of resistance, treaty pressure, and dispossession.
Remembering Attakullakulla
Attakullakulla’s story belongs to Appalachian history because it is rooted in the Overhill towns, the Little Tennessee River, the mountain paths, and the contested boundary between Cherokee country and colonial settlement. It is also a reminder that Appalachian history did not begin with cabins, courthouses, coal camps, or state lines. Long before those things, it was a Native diplomatic landscape.
He was called the Little Carpenter, but there was nothing small about the world he tried to hold together. He moved between beloved towns and colonial capitals, between wampum belts and written treaties, between trade needs and land hunger, between peace councils and war parties. He did not stop dispossession. No single diplomat could. But for decades he worked in the narrow space between survival and catastrophe.
To read his life through the records is to see a Cherokee leader trying again and again to keep the path open, even as the ground beneath that path was being claimed, surveyed, sold, and settled.
Sources & Further Reading
Timberlake, Henry. The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake. London, 1765. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/65256/65256-h/65256-h.htm
“Georgia; North Carolina; Cherokee Indian Nation.” Colonial and State Records of North Carolina. Fort Augusta talks, November 1763. https://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr11-0084
Corkran, David H. “Attakullakulla.” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. NCpedia. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/attakullakulla
Schroedl, Gerald F. “Attakullakulla.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/attakullakulla/
Schroedl, Gerald F. “Chota.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/chota/
Colonial Williamsburg. “Attakullakulla, Little Carpenter, and the Art of Diplomacy.” Colonial Williamsburg. https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/discover/18th-century-people/stories-of-american-indian-life/attakullakulla-little-carpenter-and-the-art-of-diplomacy/
British Museum. “The Seven Cherokee Indians.” 1730 print after Markham, printed by Isaac Basire. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_Y-1-110
University of Georgia, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. “Cherokee Indians, 1730.” De Renne Collection. https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/catalog/ms3704_aspace_ref19_38h
Anderson, Robert. “The Treaty of Hard Labor, 1768.” Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/the-treaty-of-hard-labor-1768/
Ogilvy, William. “The Treaty of Hard Labor, October 14, 1768.” Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/the-treaty-of-hard-labor-october-14-1768/
Dease, Jared. “Primary Source: The Transylvania Purchase and the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, March 17, 1775.” ANCHOR: A North Carolina History Online Resource. NCpedia. https://www.ncanchor.org/anchor/primary-source-transylvania
“Tennessee Treaties.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/treaties/
Corkran, David H. The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740–1762. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. https://www.worldcat.org/title/cherokee-frontier-conflict-and-survival-1740-1762/oclc/384447
McDowell, William L., Jr., ed. Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, 1754–1765. Colonial Records of South Carolina, Series 2. Columbia: South Carolina Archives Department, 1958–1970. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000552595
Oliphant, John. Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 1756–1763. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. https://www.worldcat.org/title/peace-and-war-on-the-anglo-cherokee-frontier-1756-1763/oclc/45879827
Tortora, Daniel J. Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469621227/carolina-in-crisis/
Kelton, Paul. “The British and Indian War: Cherokee Power and the Fate of Empire in North America.” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2012): 763–792. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.69.4.0763
Alden, John Richard. John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier: A Study of Indian Relations, War, Trade, and Land Problems in the Southern Wilderness, 1754–1775. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1944. https://www.worldcat.org/title/john-stuart-and-the-southern-colonial-frontier/oclc/1528836
Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803287600/
Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/american-revolution-in-indian-country/9C7B3C62A5B4D3C949E6C90CC45B96EF
Hoig, Stan. The Cherokees and Their Chiefs: In the Wake of Empire. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998. https://www.uapress.com/product/the-cherokees-and-their-chiefs/
Malone, Henry Thompson. Cherokees of the Old South: A People in Transition. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956. https://ugapress.org/book/9780820335421/cherokees-of-the-old-south/
Dowd, Gregory Evans. “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier.” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1996): 527–560. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2947208
Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/1163/spirited-resistance
Adair, James. The History of the American Indians. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1775. https://archive.org/details/historyofamerica00adai
Bartram, William. Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida. Philadelphia: James & Johnson, 1791. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/bartram/bartram.html
Author Note: Attakullakulla’s story is one of those Appalachian histories that shows how much of the region’s past began before county lines, state borders, and settlement maps. I wanted to treat him not just as a treaty signer, but as a Cherokee diplomat trying to hold a homeland together while the colonial world closed in around it.