During the American Revolution and afterward, Dragging Canoe's forces were sometimes joined by Upper Muskogee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Indians from other tribes, along with British Loyalists, and agents of France and Spain.

Eventually, he became the headman of Mialoquo ("Great Island Town", "Amoyeli Egwa" in the Cherokee language) on the Little Tennessee River.

When the Cherokee chose to ally with the British against the colonists at the onset of the Revolutionary War, Dragging Canoe was eager to fight and was assigned to be at the head of one of the major forces of the three-pronged attack which opened the war with the frontiersmen of the Overmountain settlements, with his force attacking Heaton's station in the Battle of Island Flats.

[3] Following the colonial militias' counterattacks in late summer and fall 1776—which destroyed the Cherokee Middle, Valley, and Lower Towns in Tennessee and the Carolinas—his father and Oconostota sued for peace.

Opposing his father's counsel and refusing to admit defeat, Dragging Canoe led a band of about 500 Overhill Cherokee out of the towns, and they settled further south.

[2] In spring of 1779, American pioneer Evan Shelby led an expedition of frontiersmen from Virginia and North Carolina to destroy Dragging Canoe's Chickamauga towns.

[citation needed] Dragging Canoe died February 29, 1792, at Running Water Town,[2] from exhaustion (or possibly a heart attack) after dancing all night celebrating the recent conclusion of an alliance with the Muskogee and the Choctaw.

[citation needed] Historians such as John P. Brown in Old Frontiers, and James Mooney in his early ethnographic book, Myths of the Cherokee, consider him a role model for the younger Tecumseh, who was a member of a band of Shawnee living with the Chickamauga and taking part in their wars.