The Cherokee leader Caesar travels throughout the Cherokee towns during the winter of 1715-16, drumming up support for war against the Creek.

Other prestigious and respected Cherokee leaders urge caution and patience, including Charitey Hagey, the Conjurer of Tugaloo, one of the Lower Towns closest to South Carolina.

Many of the Lower Town Cherokee are open to peace with South Carolina, but reluctant to fight anyone other than the Yuchi and Savannah River Shawnee.

The South Carolinians are told that a "flag of truce" had been sent from the Lower Towns to the Creek, and that a delegation of Creek headmen had promised to come.

Charitey Hagey and his supporters seem to be offering to broker peace talks between the Creek and South Carolinians.

They persuade the South Carolinians to alter their plans of war.

Instead, the South Carolinians spend the winter trying to dissuade Caesar and the pro-war Cherokee.

The South Carolinians are summoned on January 27, 1716, to Tugaloo, where they discover that the Creek delegation had arrived and that the Cherokee have killed eleven or twelve of them.

The Cherokee claim that the Creek delegation was in fact a war party of hundreds of Creek and Yamasee, and that they had nearly succeeded in ambushing the South Carolinian forces.

It remains unknown exactly what happened at Tugaloo.

That the Cherokee and Creek met in private without the South Carolinians presents suggests that the Cherokee were still divided on whether to join the Creek and attack South Carolina or join the South Carolinians and attack the Creek.

It is possible that the Cherokee, who were relatively new to trade with the British, hoped to replace the Creek as South Carolina's main trading partner.

Whatever the underlying factors, the murders at Tugaloo probably resulted from an unpredictable and heated debate which, like the Pocotaligo massacre, ended in an impasse resolved through murder.

After the Tugaloo massacre, the only possible solution is war between the Cherokee and Creek and an alliance between the Cherokee and South Carolina.