Native history
Early
1600s-1821
City of Atlanta
General area only

Muscogee and Cherokee borderland

By the 1700s the Chattahoochee valley around Atlanta was the northern edge of Muscogee (Creek) country, with Cherokee country upriver and to the northwest. Trails, trade and a shifting line tied the two nations together here.

See it on the map All Early records

The record

The Muscogee alliance formed by the late 1600s among towns speaking Muskogee, Hitchiti, Alabama and other languages (NGE). The encyclopedia's Chattahoochee article places Muscogee settlement in the valley below present-day Atlanta and the Cherokee near the river's headwaters. Creek frontier towns stood at Standing Peachtree and, just southwest of this map, at Sand Town (Oktahatalofa) and Buzzard Roost (Sulecauga) (GHS). An older line along the Hightower Trail was recognized as a boundary between Cherokee and Creek lands (GHS), and agent Benjamin Hawkins fixed the southern edge of the Cherokee hunting grounds more formally in 1798 (NGE, Fort Daniel). On December 11, 1821, the two nations agreed that their line would run from Buzzard Roost on the Chattahoochee straight to the Coosa River opposite Wills Creek.