Blood in the Water

Within the Declaration of Independence there is a sentence that has gone largely unaddressed in which the founders accused King George III of unleashing upon the inhabitants of “their frontiers” monsters whom they referred to as “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare was an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Who they were referring to specifically has never been addressed . . . until now.

In 1775, just before the Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, a man named Tsiyu Gansini (Dragging Canoe) declared war on the Virginians who were attempting to illegally purchase Kentucky for the Transylvania Land Company at the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals. Defecting from the Cherokee he relocated to the Chattanooga region, rallied thousands of warriors to him from over fourteen different Indian nations, and began diplomatically organizing a Pan-Indian Kingdom with all of the leading war chiefs east of the Mississippi at the time. Handing the United States its most humiliating defeat ever in 1791 he successfully established his union and then disappeared from recorded history as all of his leading warriors went on to become dominant figures among their various tribes. This is his story, the first book of a new genre called Nawodi Literature.