Talk:Chickamauga Wars

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of the following WikiProjects:


It is requested that a photograph or photographs be included in this article to improve its quality.

Wikipedians in Tennessee may be able to help!
The Free Image Search Tool (FIST) may be able to locate suitable images on Flickr and other web sites.

After adding a tremendous amount of material to the page entitled Chickamauga (tribe) and rexamining it more closely, I realized that another article entirely should be created since the subject matter encompassed by the material I'd added had grown exponentially; therefore, this present article came into existence.--Nattybumpo 27 October 2006

This page would greatly benefit by the supplement of digital pictures taken at the Fort Sycamore Shoals State Park located in Elizabethton, Tennessee (in addition to the reconstruction of a "Fort Sycamore Shoals" the visitor center has a bust of Dragging Canoe in the lobby...)4.129.71.185 18:01, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 02:48, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Source of the name of this article?

What is the source for the name "Chickamauga Wars"? I've never seen this specific title used outside of Wikipedia, although it has of course spread over the Internet because of Wikipedia's visibility. Was this term coined on Wikipedia? Have any print sources used this term? —Kevin Myers 12:05, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Since I'm the one who wrote the article, I'll answer this. I may have picked up the term somewhere in something I've read, I can't remember, but I used the name "Chickamauga Wars" to de-emphasize the name "Chickamauga" being applied to the militant Cherokee, and others, led by Dragging Canoe. Too many people the past twenty years or so have bought into the myth of a "Chickamauga" tribe separate from the Cherokee as a whole. Besides, the wars between Dragging Canoe's followers and the nascent United States of America were among the longest lasting in American history and deserved a name. For all I know, I may have coined the phrase, or, as I said before, maybe I picked it up somewhere. FYI, I did vet the article, including its title, with Raymond Evans, the author of several of my sources, before posting it. Natty4bumpo 2336, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply. As you probably know, coining a new proper noun on Wikipedia is frowned upon: as Wikipedia editors, we should aim to summarize scholarly writings without coining new terms in the process. But the article has to be called something, of course, which is difficult because, as one of the many Native American wars often overlooked in history books, this war doesn't have a commonly accepted name. In such cases, we must use a descriptive title rather than trying to coin a proper name. So this article would be better titled "Chickamauga wars" (with a small "W"), to make it a descriptive title rather than a newly minted proper noun. This is perhaps a minor point, but it's a distinction that gets a lot of attention on Wikipedia.
However, I'm not sure that your title really accomplishes your goal to "de-emphasize the name 'Chickamauga' being applied to the militant Cherokee"; I think it actually does the opposite. To de-emphasize "Chickamauga", various descriptive article titles could be chosen: Dragging Canoe's resistance movement, or Cherokee military history (1776–1794), etc. Those are wordy compared to "Chickamauga wars", but they do get the point across. Just food for thought in case you want to consider other possibilities. Cheers! —Kevin Myers 01:42, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
You're obviously not familiar with New Age Indians and wannabes. As I indicated at the top of the discussion, there had been an article called simply "Chickamauga" purporting to be about the "Chickamauga tribe". As you can or may have already discovered, there is no longer aan article about the "Chickamauga"; the "tribe" never existed as such, but the wars themselves certainly did. Since frontiersmen at the time referred to their opponents as the Chickamauga Cherokee, or sometimes simply as "Chickmauga", using the term "Chickamauga Wars" has the benefit of being historically accurate. As for supposedly inventing a new term, as I mentioned before, I vetted the entire article with Raymond Evans, one of the two founders of the Journal of Cherokee Studies, before posting it, and he said it was a good way to refer to it. I consider him a much better judge of a proper way to refer to this series of conflicts than either you or anyone else at Wikipedia. Natty4bumpo 2056, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
It's a shame that you've made such an unproductive and petulant reply. (Your non sequitur that I'm "obviously not familiar with New Age Indians and wannabes" is wrong but irrelevant.) To get back on point: Wikipedia policies exist in part to prevent people from pretending to be authoritative when they're not. You want people to simply take your word that you've privately vetted the article title with a scholar. You may be telling the truth, but who knows? Certainly the article is not well written enough to have any claims to be authoritative. For example, you wrote in the article:

In response to the settlement of Fort Boonesborough, the first inside Kentucky and founded by a group under Daniel Boone, the Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, and some Cherokee attacked a scouting and forage party from the settlement that included Boone’s son, beginning what is known as Dunmore's War (1773-1774).

There are at least two factual errors in that one sentence. I'm surprised that Mr. Evans, if he actually read your article, didn't point them out to you. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the article's problems; the title is only the beginning. I thought perhaps you'd be open to suggestions and want to improve the article. My mistake. —Kevin Myers 02:34, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
First, Ray didn't gov over the article with a fine tooth comb, merely pointed out a few things that jumped out at him, and second, I'm not even sure if the paragraph you singled out is mine; someone from Northeast Tennessee and a strong advocate of James Roberston inserted a bunch of material regarding him and his activities in that section of the state and that may have been part of it. Regarding any mistakes I myself may have made, well, dig up the authors, which in some cases may have to be done literally, and complain to them. Everytime there was a question or a difference, I checked sources until I got a majority opinion. If you would like to ask Mr. Evans himself about the article and his review of it either by email or phone, that can be arranged. And you are correct, at least about the Fort Boonesborough mention...that didn't take place, the founding of it, I mean, until 1775. Natty4bumpo 2216, 19 January 2008 (UTC)