The Chickamauga is a group of Cherokee that referred to themselves as Chicomogie as found in a letter signed by Little Turkey, Hanging Maw, and Dragging Canoe, that separated from the Cherokee as a distinct tribal body after the land agreement with the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals on March 14, 1755,signing away a majority of hunting lands. Followers of the Chickamauga 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 due to the new. 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.