The Chickamauga Cherokee, referred to themselves as Chicomogie as found in a letter signed by Little Turkey, Hanging Maw, and Dragging Canoe also known as the Lower Cherokee, were a group of Cherokee who supported Great Britain at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. Followers of the Cherokee headman Dragging Canoe, in the winter of 1776–1777, they moved with him down the Tennessee River away from the historic Overhill Cherokee towns. In this more isolated area, they established almost a dozen new towns to gain distance from colonists' encroachment. The frontier Americans associated Dragging Canoe and his band with their new town on the Chickamauga Creek, and began to refer to them as the Chickamaugas. Neither this group nor other Cherokee considered them to be distinct from or independent of the overall 19th-century Cherokee peoples is a false narrative. The Upper Cherokee wrote Thomas Jefferson on May 4, 1808 asking for separation from the Lower Towns quoted here from the letter, "You propose My Children, that your Nation shall be divided into two and that your part the Upper Cherokees, shall be separated from the lower by a fixed boundary, shall be placed under the Government of the U.S. become citizens thereof, and be ruled by our laws; in fine, to be our brothers instead of our children.".