Standing Turkey

Standing Turkey
Portrait of Standing Turkey, by Francis Parsons, 1762, at the Smithsonian Institution

Standing Turkey — also known as Cunne Shote or Kunagadoga — succeeded his uncle, Kanagatucko, or Old Hop, as First Beloved Man of the Cherokee upon the latter's death in 1760. Pro-French like his uncle, he steered the Cherokee into war with the British colonies of South Carolina and Virginia in ther aftermath of the murders of several Cherokee leaders held hostage at Fort Prince George at the edge of the Lower Towns of the Cherokee in what is now western South Carolina. He held office until the end of the Anglo-Cherokee War in 1761, when he was deposed in favor of Attakullakulla.

He was one of three Cherokee leaders to go with Henry Timberlake to London in 1762-1763, the others being Ostenaco and Pidgeon.

In 1782, he was one of a party of Cherokee which joined the Lenape, Shawnee, and Chickasaw in a diplomatic visit to the Spanish at Fort St. Louis in the Missouri country in seeking a new avenue of obtaining arms and other assistance in the prosecution of their ongoing conflict with the Americans in the Ohio Valley. The group of Cherokee by Standing Turkey sought and received permission to settle in Spanish Louisiana, in the region of the White River.[1]

References

[1] Tanner, p.99.

Sources

  • Brown, John P. Old Frontiers: The Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their Removal to the West, 1838. (Kingsport: Southern Publishers, 1938).
  • Tanner, Helen Hornbeck. "Cherokees in the Ohio Country". Journal of Cherokee Studies, Vol. III, No. 2, pp. 95–103. (Cherokee: Museum of the Cherokee Indian, 1978).

See also

Preceded by
Kanagatucko
First Beloved Man
1760–1761
Succeeded by
Attakullakulla