The view from Cravens House on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.
LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, Tenn. — If you drive up Lookout Mountain on the Scenic Hwy, there stands a lonely sign on the side of the highway with information about a little known battle that took place 79 years before the Civil War.
As America gears up to celebrate its 250th birthday this year, here’s a local twist in the story of independence: while fireworks will light the skies from Philadelphia to Boston, one of the Revolution’s final frontier clashes echoed not along the Atlantic coast, but high atop Lookout Mountain.
On September 20, 1782, a fight between frontier militia led by John Sevier and the Chickamauga Cherokee under Chief Dragging Canoe, ᏥᏳ ᎦᏅᏏᏂ, unfolded just weeks before preliminary peace articles were signed, a reminder that even as the young nation’s independence was being secured on paper, the struggle for control of the American frontier was still very much underway…