Land of the Cherokees
The Cherokees were among the first. They were the first to inhabit the Smokies, the first to leave them and yet remain behind. By the 1600s these Indians had built in the Southern Appalachians a Nation hundreds of years old, a way of life in harmony with the surrounding natural world, a culture richly varied and satisfying. But barely two centuries later, the newly formed government of the United States was pushing the Cherokees ever farther west. In the struggle for homeland, a new era had arrived: a time for the pioneer and for the settler from Europe and the eastern seaboard to stake claims to what seemed to them mere wilderness but which to the Cherokees was a physical and spiritual abode.
Perhaps it was during the last Ice Age that Indians drifted from Asia to this continent across what was then a land passage through Alaska’s Bering Strait. Finding and settling various regions of North America, this ancient people fragmented after thousands of years into different tribal and linguistic stocks. The Iroquois, inhabitants of what are now the North Central and Atlantic states, became one of the most distinctive of these stocks.
By the year 1000, the Cherokees, a tribe of Iroquoian origin, had broken off the main line and turned south. Whether wanting to or being pressured to, they slowly followed the mountain leads of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies until they reached the security and peace of the mist-shrouded Southern Appalachians. These “Mountaineers,” as other Iroquois called them, claimed an empire of roughly 104,000 square kilometers (40,000 square miles). Bounded on the north by the mighty Ohio River, it stretched southward in a great circle through eight states, including half of South Carolina and almost all of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Cherokee settlements dotted much of this territory, particularly in eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northern Georgia. These state regions are the rough outlines of what came to be the three main divisions of the Cherokee Nation: the Lower settlements on the headwaters of the Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina; the Middle Towns on the Little Tennessee and Tuckasegee rivers in North Carolina; and the Overhill Towns with a capital on the Tellico River in Tennessee.
Between the Middle and the Overhill Cherokee, straddling what is now the North Carolina-Tennessee line, lay the imposing range of the Great Smoky Mountains. Except for Mt. Mitchell in the nearby Blue Ridge, these were the highest mountains east of the Black Hills in South Dakota and the Rockies in Colorado. They formed the heart of the territorial Cherokee Nation. The Oconaluftee River, rushing down to the Tuckasegee from the North Carolina side of the Smokies, watered the homesites and fields of many Cherokees. Kituwah, a Middle Town near the present-day Deep Creek campground, may have been in the first Cherokee village.
National Park Service
Adventurers were drawn to the Great Smoky Mountains and the surrounding area in the 18th century. In 1760 a young British agent from Virginia, Lt. Henry Timberlake, journeyed far into Cherokee country. He observed Indian life and even sketched a map of the Overhill territory, complete with Fort Loudoun, “Chote” or Echota, and the “Enemy Mountains.”
For the most part, however, the Cherokees settled only in the foothills of the Smokies. Like the later pioneers, the Cherokees were content with the fertile lands along the rivers and creeks. But more than contentment was involved. Awed by this tangled wilderness, the Indians looked upon these heights as something both sacred and dangerous. One of the strongest of the old Cherokee myths tells of a race of spirits living there in mountain caves. These handsome “Little People” were usually helpful and kind, but they could make the intruder lose his way.
If the Cherokees looked up to the Smokies, they aimed at life around them with a level eye. Although the Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto and his soldiers ventured through Cherokee country in 1540 and chronicled generally primitive conditions, a Spanish missionary noted 17 years later that the Cherokees appeared “sedate and thoughtful, dwelling in peace in their native mountains; they cultivated their fields and lived in prosperity and plenty.”
They were moderately tall and rather slender with long black hair and sometimes very light complexions. They wore animal skin loincloths and robes, moccasins and a knee-length buckskin hunting shirt. A Cherokee man might dress more gaudily than a woman, but both enjoyed decorating their bodies extravagantly, covering themselves with paint and, as trade with whites grew and flourished, jewelry.
The tepee of Indian lore did not exist here. The Cherokee house was a rough log structure with one door and no windows. A small hole in the bark roof allowed smoke from a central fire to escape. Furniture and decorations included cane seats and painted hemp rugs. A good-sized village might number 40 or 50 houses.
Chota, in the Overhill country on the Little Tennessee River, was a center of civil and religious authority; it was also known as a “Town of Refuge,” a place of asylum for Indian criminals, especially murderers. The Smokies settlement of Kituwah served as a “Mother Town,” or a headquarters, for one of the seven Cherokee clans.
These clans—Wolf, Blue, Paint, Bird, Deer, Long Hair, and Wild Potato—were basic to the social structure of the tribe. The Cherokees traced their kinship by clan; marriage within clans was forbidden. And whereas the broad divisions of Lower, Middle, and Overhill followed natural differences in geography and dialect, the clans assumed great political significance. Each clan selected its own chiefs and its own “Mother Town.” Although one or two persons in Chota might be considered symbolic leaders, any chief’s powers were limited to advice and persuasion.
The Cherokees extended this democratic tone to all their towns. Each village, whether built along or near a stream or surrounded by protective log palisades, would have as its center a Town House and Square. The Square, a level field in front, was used for celebrations and dancing. The Town House itself sheltered the town council, plus the entire village, during their frequent meetings. In times of decision-making, as many as 500 people crowded into the smoky, earth-domed building where they sat in elevated rows around the council and heard debates on issues from war to the public granary.
Democracy was the keynote of the Cherokee Nation. “White” chiefs served during peacetime; “Red” chiefs served in time of war. Priests once formed a special class, but after an episode in which one of the priests attempted to “take” the wife of the leading chief’s brother, all such privileged persons were made to take their place alongside—not in front of—the other members of the community.
Women enjoyed the same status in Cherokee society as men. Clan kinship, land included, followed the mother’s side of the family. Although the men hunted much of the time, they helped with some household duties, such as sewing. Marriages were solemnly negotiated. And it was possible for women to sit in the councils as equals to men. Indeed, Nancy Ward, one of those equals who enjoyed the rank of Beloved Woman, did much to strengthen bonds of friendship between Cherokee and white during the turbulent years of the mid-18th century. The Irishman James Adair, who traded with the Cherokees during the years 1736 to 1743, even accused these Indians of “petticoat government.” Yet he must have found certain attractions in this arrangement, for he himself married a Cherokee woman of the Deer Clan.
Smithsonian Institution
A Cherokee fishes in the Oconaluftee River.
Charles S. Grossman
A team of oxen hauls a sled full of corn stalks for a Cherokee farmer near Ravensford, North Carolina. Oxen were more common beasts of burden in the mountains than horses mainly because they were less expensive.
Adair, an intent observer of Indian life, marveled at the Cherokees’ knowledge of nature’s medicines: “I do not remember to have seen or heard of an Indian dying by the bite of a snake, when out at war, or a hunting ... they, as well as all other Indian nations, have a great knowledge of specific virtues in simples: applying herbs and plants, on the most dangerous occasions, and seldom if ever, fail to effect a thorough cure, from the natural bush.... For my own part, I would prefer an old Indian before any surgeon whatsoever....”
Pages 40-41: At Ayunini’s house a woman pounds corn into meal with a mortar and pestle. The simple, log house is typical of Cherokee homes at the turn of the century. This one has stone chimneys, whereas many merely had a hole in the roof.
The Indians marveled at nature itself. A Civil War veteran remarked that the Cherokees “possess a keen and delicate appreciation of the beautiful in nature.” Most of their elaborate mythology bore a direct relation to rock and plant, animal and tree, river and sky. One myth told of a tortoise and a hare. The tortoise won the race, but not by steady plodding. He placed his relatives at intervals along the course; the hare, thinking the tortoise was outrunning him at every turn, wore himself out before the finish.
The Cherokees’ many myths and their obedience to nature required frequent performance of rituals. There were many nature celebrations, including three each corn season: the first at the planting of this staple crop, the second at the very beginning of the harvest, the third and last and largest at the moment of the fullest ripening. One of the most important rites, the changing of the fire, inaugurated each new year. All flames were extinguished and the hearths were swept clean of ashes. The sacred fire at the center of the Town House was then rekindled.
One ritual aroused particular enthusiasm: war. Battles drew the tribe together, providing an arena for fresh exploits and a common purpose and source of inspiration for the children. The Cherokees, with their spears, bows and arrows, and mallet-shaped clubs, met any challenger: Shawnee, Tuscarora, Creek, English, or American. In 1730, Cherokee chiefs told English emissaries: “Should we make peace with the Tuscaroras ... we must immediately look for some other with whom we can be engaged in our beloved occupation.” Even in peacetime, the Cherokees might invade settlements just for practice.
But when the white man came, the struggle was for larger stakes. In 1775 William Bartram, the first able native-born American botanist, could explore the dangerous Cherokee country and find artistry there, perfected even in the minor arts of weaving and of carving stone tobacco pipes. He could meet and exchange respects with the famous Cherokee statesman Attakullakulla, also known as the Little Carpenter. And yet, a year later, other white men would destroy more than two-thirds of the settled Cherokee Nation.
Who were these fateful newcomers? Most of them were Scotch-Irish, a distinctive and adventuresome blend of people transplanted chiefly from the Scottish Lowlands to Northern Ireland during the reign of James I. Subsequently they flocked to the American frontier in search of religious freedom, economic opportunity, and new land they could call their own.
In the late 1600s, while the English colonized the Atlantic seaboard in North and South Carolina and Virginia, while the French settled Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana ports on the Gulf of Mexico, and while the Spanish pushed into Florida, 5,000 Presbyterian Scots left England for “the Plantation” in Northern Ireland. But as they settled and prospered, England passed laws prohibiting certain articles of Irish trade, excluding Presbyterians from civil and military offices, even declaring their ministers liable to prosecution for performing marriages.
The Scotch-Irish, as they were then called, found such repression unbearable and fled in the early 18th century to ports in Delaware and Pennsylvania. With their influx, Pennsylvania land prices skyrocketed. Poor, rocky soil to the immediate west turned great numbers of these Scotch-Irish southward down Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and along North Carolina’s Piedmont plateau. From 1732 to 1754, the population of North Carolina more than doubled. Extravagant stories of this new and fertile land also drew many from the German Palatinate to America; during the middle 1700s these hardworking “Pennsylvania Dutch” poured into the southern colonies.
Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were colonies of the crown, and the Scotch-Irish and Germans intermarried with the already settled British. These Englishmen, of course, had their own reasons for leaving their more conservative countrymen in the mother country and starting a whole new life. Some were adventurers eager to explore a different land, some sought religious freedom, not a few were second sons—victims of the law of primogeniture—who arrived with hopes of building new financial empires of their own. They all confronted the frontier.
They encountered the Cherokee Nation and its vast territory. Earliest relations between the Cherokees and the pioneers were, to say the least, marked by paradox. Traders like James Adair formed economic ties and carried on a heavy commerce of guns for furs, whisky for blankets, jewelry for horses. But there was also deep resentment. The English colonies, especially South Carolina, even took Indian prisoners and sold them into slavery.
The Spanish had practiced this kind of slavery, arguing that thus the Indians would be exposed to the boon of Christianity. The English colonies employed what were known as “indentured servants,” persons who paid off the cost of their passage to America by working often as hard as slaves. And in later years both the white man and some of the more prosperous Cherokees kept Negro slaves. Such instances in the Nation were more rare than not, however, and a Cherokee might work side by side with any slave he owned; marriage between them was not infrequent. Be that as it may, the deplorable colonial policy of enforced servitude at any level, which continued into the late 1700s, sowed seeds of bitterness that ended in a bloody harvest.
Like the pioneers, the Cherokees cherished liberty above all else and distrusted government. Both left religion to the family and refused to institute any orthodox system of belief. Even the forms of humor were often parallel; the Cherokee could be as sarcastic as the pioneer and used irony to correct behavior. As one historian put it: “The coward was praised for his valor; the liar for his veracity; and the thief for his honesty.” But through the ironies of history, the Scotch-Irish-English-German pioneers of the highlands, who were similar to the Cherokees in a multitude of ways and quite different from the lowland aristocrats, became the Indians’ worst enemy.
Their conflict was, in a sense, inevitable. The countries of England and France and their representatives in America both battled and befriended the Cherokees during the 18th century. Their main concern lay in their own rivalry, not in any deep-founded argument with the Indians. As they expanded the American frontier and immersed themselves in the process of building a country, the colonists inevitably encroached upon the Cherokee Nation.
Smithsonian Institution
In 1730, Sir Alexander Cuming took seven Cherokee leaders to England in an attempt to build up good relations with the tribe. Among the group was the youth Ukwaneequa (right), who was to become the great Cherokee chief Attakullakulla.
In 1730, in a burst of freewheeling diplomacy, the British sent a flamboyant and remarkable representative, Sir Alexander Cuming, into remote Cherokee country on a mission of goodwill. After meeting with the Indians on their own terms and terrain, Cuming arranged a massive public relations campaign and escorted Attakullakulla and six other Cherokee leaders to London, where they were showered with gifts and presented at court to King George II. The Cherokees allied themselves with Britain, but this did not discourage the French from trying to win their allegiance. When the English in 1743 captured a persuasive visionary named Christian Priber who sought to transform the Cherokee Nation into a socialist utopia, they suspected him of being a French agent and took him to prison in Frederica, Georgia. He was left to die in the fort.
The British soldiers were not as friendly as British diplomats. During the French and Indian War of the late 1750s and the early 1760s, when England battled France for supremacy in the New World, English soldiers treated the Cherokees with disdain and violence. The Cherokees returned the atrocities in kind. The frontier blazed with death and destruction; each side accumulated its own collection of horrors endured and meted out. Although Cherokee chiefs sued for peace, Gov. William Henry Lyttleton of South Carolina declared war on them in 1759. The Carolinas offered 25 English pounds for every Indian scalp. A year later the Cherokees, under the command of Oconostota, captured Fort Loudoun at the fork of the Tellico and Little Tennessee rivers. But in June of 1761, Capt. James Grant and some 2,600 men destroyed the Nation’s Middle Towns, burning 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of corn, beans, and peas, and forcing 5,000 Cherokees into the forests for the winter.
After the English defeated the French in 1763, the British government moved to appease the Indians and consolidate its control of the continent. A British proclamation forbade all white settlement beyond the Appalachian divide. But the proclamation was soon to be broken. Pioneers such as Daniel Boone and James Robertson successfully led their own and neighbors’ families through Appalachian gaps and river valleys until a trickle of explorers became a flood of homesteaders. During the next decade, settlers poured across the mountains into Kentucky and northeastern Tennessee.
While England was regaining the friendship of the Cherokees, the American colonists were alienating both the Indians and the British. In the late 1760s a group of North Carolinians calling themselves Regulators opposed taxation, land rents, and extensive land grants to selected individuals, and caused unrest throughout the Piedmont. In 1771, at Alamance, an estimated 2,000 Regulators were defeated by the troops of British Gov. William Tryon. Thousands of anti-royalist North Carolinians fled westward as a result of this battle. Alexander Cameron, an English representative living in the Overhill Towns, wrote in 1766 that the pioneer occupation of Cherokee lands amounted to an infestation by villains and horse thieves that was “enough to create disturbances among the most Civilized Nations.”
The protest spirit of the Regulators spread to the New England colonies during the early 1770s. By 1776, when the American Revolution began, the Cherokees had understandably but unfortunately chosen to take the British side. Britain issued guns to all Indians and offered rewards for American scalps, yet this was not enough to secure the over-mountain territory for the English crown. Within a year, American forces were fighting for the frontier, and in a coordinated pincer movement, Col. Samuel Jack with 200 Georgians, Gen. Griffith Rutherford with 2,400 North Carolinians, Col. Andrew Williamson with 1,800 South Carolinians, and Col. William Christian with 2,000 Virginians demolished more than 50 Cherokee towns. Two treaties resulted from this campaign; more than 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of Indian land, including northeastern Tennessee, much of South Carolina, and all lands east of the Blue Ridge, were ceded to the United States.
Ayunini, or Swimmer, was a medicine man. He was a major source of information about Cherokee history, mythology, botany, and medicine when James Mooney of the Bureau of American Ethnology visited the area in 1888.
Smithsonian Institution
Peace did not follow the treaties, however. Dragging Canoe, pock-marked son of Attakullakulla, decided to fight. Against the wishes of many Cherokee chiefs, he organized a renegade tribe that moved to five Lower Towns near present-day Chattanooga where they became known as the Chickamaugas. But the eventual outcome of the drama had already been determined. Despite conflict and danger, the settlers pushed on. In 1780 the Tennesseans John Sevier and Isaac Shelby joined forces with those of William Campbell from Virginia and Joseph McDowell from North Carolina and managed to win a decisive victory over the English at Kings Mountain, South Carolina. By fighting Indian-style on rugged hillside terrain, they overwhelmed a detachment of General Cornwallis’ southern forces under Col. Patrick Ferguson. These over-mountain men immediately returned to Tennessee and in reprisal for Indian raids during their absence destroyed Chota and nine other Overhill Towns, slaughtering women and children as well as Cherokee warriors.
In 1783, with the end of the Revolution, all hope for the survival of the original Cherokee Nation was extinguished. Although the newly formed American government attempted to conciliate the Indians, it could not prevent its own citizens from hungering for ever larger bites of land. Treaties with the loose Cherokee confederation of clans became more and more frequent. As if by fate, a disastrous smallpox epidemic struck the Cherokees; the number of warriors dwindled to less than half of what it had been 50 years before. The Cherokee capital was moved from Chota southward into Georgia. In 1794 Maj. James Ore and 550 militiamen from Nashville, Tennessee, obliterated the Chickamaugas and their Five Towns.
Most of the Cherokees parted with the Smokies. At the Treaty of Holston in 1791, they gave up the northeastern quarter of what is now the park. Seven years later, they ceded a southern strip. And at Washington, D.C., in February of 1819, nearly a century after their first treaty with the white man in 1721, the Cherokees signed their 21st treaty. This time they parted with a quarter of their entire Nation, and they lost the rest of their sacred Smoky Mountains. Scattered families continued to live in the foothills. But the newcomer—this pioneer turned settler—had arrived.
Between her many had-to-be-done tasks around the house, Mollie McCarter Ogle rocks her daughter Mattie on the porch.
Laura Thornborough