06/06/2026
Salem Diary, June 6th, 1776📜✒️
"A man came from the Atkin and said that Mr. Brooks, who had been sent Express to find out about the Indian affairs, had returned. He reported that the Indians had killed three men in Powels Valley. From the three tribes, Creeks, Chickasaws and Cherokees, about seven hundred warriors had turned out against the settlements, not by order of the royal officers, but incited by about forty whites, who had fled to them from the Congaree. The chiefs of the Cherokee Nation had not approved, but the younger men would not obey them…"
The American War for Independence ignited a new war between colonists in the Southeast and the Cherokee. Memories of the 1759-1761 Anglo-Cherokee War were still fresh in the minds of both colonists and indigenous peoples. Borders established by treaties ending the earlier conflict were increasingly ignored by Georgians, Carolinians, and Virginians, as settlers continued to push into the Appalachian Mountains and beyond into what is now Tennessee and Kentucky. The Moravians in Wachovia were now surrounded by conflict: the possibility of British coastal landings to the East, local Whigs and Tories persecuting each other, and now a renewed conflict with native peoples to the West.
📸Portion of "A general map of the southern British colonies in America" by DeBrahm, Sayer, and Bennett, 1776. Courtesy Library of Congress.
