After leaving Georgia, Joseph Vann settled on the south bank of the Tennessee River, a few miles above the Chickamauga Dam. He was very industrious, and soon there were thirty-five houses erected and occupied on his property. The village was known as Vanntown. There was scarcely a moment’s rest, however, for the poor Indians. The greedy whites kept encroaching on their real estate until only a small portion of their once large territory remained. Several years previously the government had induced some of the Cherokees to move to the Arkansas, west of the Mississippi. The last of the Cherokees departed in 1838. At that time the white settlers took possession of the lands lying south of the Tennessee River. Three years previous to that date, however, the whites had slowly been slipping into their lands. Hamilton County’s boundary was then extended to take in the Cherokee lands from the Tennessee River to the Georgia line. It was at that time that Dallas lost the county seat, since Vanntown was chosen and a court house was erected. This happened about the time that William H. Harrison was elected President of the United States, so Vanntown became Harrison, Tennessee. [Illustration: A Near View of the Chickamauga Dam and Lock.] About the year 1815, following the close of the Creek War, John Ross, Cherokee, and Timothy Meigs, son of Return J. Meigs, the Indian Agent, established a trading post seven miles south of the Chickamauga Dam. They operated a ferry as well as a general store. The place became known as Ross’ Landing, but when the Indians had departed for the lands in the West, the whites had the town surveyed, and the name was changed to _Chattanooga_. John P. Long became the first postmaster, March 22, 1837. However, this was not the first post office established in the old Cherokee lands, for on April 5, 1817, Rossville post office was established four miles to the south with John Ross as postmaster. This was said to have been the first post office established in this part of the Cherokee Nation. The word _Chattanooga_ is a corruption in the spelling of the Muskogean word _Chatanugi_, which years previously had been the name of Lookout Mountain, meaning “rock coming to a point.” In the narrow valley between the east side of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge is a small stream which was also known as _Chatanugi Creek_. Near its mouth where it empties into the Tennessee was, in the 18th century, a small Indian village by the same name. It is an interesting geological fact that in ages past the water we now know as the Tennessee River flowed south of the east base of Lookout Mountain and emptied into the Coosa River in what is now Alabama. A later upheaval blocked its southern passage and forced it to seek a new route, which it did by cutting out its way through the rough rocks of the Cumberlands.