The debate over the last battle of the American Revolution has gone on for years. The Sept. 29 Local History column featured the view of distinguished UTC history professor Dr. James Livingood that the brisk fight between John Sevier’s militia and British-backed Chickamauga braves on the sides of Lookout Mountain 11 months after Yorktown was the “Last Battle.”
Local anthropologist Raymond Evans gave a different view in the Sept. 6, 2009, Chattanooga Times Free Press:
“We know the last battle of the American Revolution was at Yorktown. In 1782 John Sevier conducted a militia raid against pro-British Cherokees that was described by Tennessee historians [John] Haywood and [JGM] Ramsey. Neither mentions a battle on Lookout Mountain. The only detailed description of the campaign by a participant was that of James Sevier, the son of John Sevier, in letters to [historian] Lyman C. Draper. James Sevier explained that John Watts, who supported the British cause as early as 1776 and became the Cherokees’ war leader upon the death of Dragging Canoe in 1792, guided the expedition. Watts was able to guide Sevier’s men away from the hostile towns by taking them down South Chickamauga Creek to destroy the corn fields at the abandoned towns devastated by Evan Shelby three years earlier, and on to the peaceful Cherokee refugees on the Coosa River. There was no engagement of any kind, much less a battle, and the campaign consisted of burning abandoned houses and vandalizing cornfields belonging to Cherokee refugees.
“The first written account of Sevier’s mythical battle on Lookout Mountain was published in 1886 by a then-popular writer named Edmund Kirke. It was included in a semi-fictional version of the American Revolution on the frontier called ‘The Rear Guard of the Revolution.’ Kirke’s account of the victory of white pioneers over ‘savages’ on Lookout Mountain was also well received by the American public coming as it did at a time when the US army was conducting a campaign of systematic extermination against the Western Indians.
“Nevertheless, the validity of Sevier’s battle on Lookout Mountain did not go unquestioned. Three years after the publication of the story, in 1889, Theodore Roosevelt in his ‘The Winning of the West’ series strongly questioned the credibility of Kirke: