Along the old "trading-path" that was wont to wind from the Cherokee country among the innumerable spurs and gorges of the Great Smoky Mountains, and through the dense primeval forests full five hundred miles to the city of Charlestown, was visible for many years, on the banks of the Little Tennessee, an "old waste town," as the abandoned place was called in the idiom of the Indians. An early date it might seem, in 1744, in this new land, for the spectacle of the ruins of a race still in possession, still unsubdued. Nearly twenty years later, after the repeated aggressive expeditions which the British government sent against the Cherokees, such vestiges became more numerous. This "waste town," however, neither fire nor sword had desolated, and the grim deeds of British powder and lead were still of the future. The enemy came in more subtle sort.
Only one of the white pack-men employed to drive a score of well-laden horses semi-annually from Charlestown to a trading-station farther along on the Great Tennessee—then called the Cherokee River—and back again used to glower fearfully at the "waste town" as he passed. He had ample leisure for speculation, for the experienced animals of the pack-train required scant heed, so regularly they swung along in single file, and the wild whoops of their drivers were for the sake of personal encouragement and the simple joy which very young men find in their own clamor. It grew specially boisterous always when they neared the site of Nilaque Great, the deserted place, as if to give warning to any vague spiritual essences, unmeet for mortal vision, that might be lurking about the "waste town," and bid them avaunt, for the place was reputed haunted.
The rest of the Carolina pack-men, trooping noisily past, averted their eyes from the darkened doors of the empty houses; the weed-grown spaces of the "beloved square," where once the ceremonies of state, the religious rites, the public games and dances were held; the council-house on its high mound, whence had been wont to issue the bland vapors of the pipe of peace or the far more significant smoke emitted from the cheera, the "sacred fire," which only the cheera-taghe, the fire-prophets,[[10]] were permitted to kindle, and which was done with pomp and ceremony in the new year, when every spark of the last year's fire had been suffered to die out.
Cuthbert Barnett, however, always looked to see what he might,—perhaps because he was a trifle bolder than the other stalwart pack-men, all riding armed to the teeth to guard the goods of the train from robbery as well as their own lives from treachery, for although the Cherokees professed friendship it was but half-hearted, as they loved the French always better than the English; perhaps because he had a touch of imagination that coerced his furtive glance; perhaps because he doubted more, or believed less, of the traditions of the day. And he saw—silence! the sunset in vacant spaces, with long, slanting, melancholy rays among the scattered houses of the hamlet; an empty doorway, here and there; a falling rotting roof; futile traces of vanished homes. Once a deer and fawn were grazing in the weed-grown fields that used to stand so thick with corn that they laughed and sung; once—it was close upon winter—he heard a bear humming and humming his content (the hunters called the sound "singing") from the den where the animal had bestowed himself among the fallen logs of a dwelling-house, half covered with great drifts of dead leaves; often an owl would cry out in alarm from some dark nook as the pack-train clattered past; and once a wolf with a stealthy and sinister tread was patrolling the "beloved square." These were but the natural incidents of the time and the ruins of the old Cherokee town.
Little did Cuddy Barnett imagine, as he gazed on the deserted and desolate place, that he was yet to behold the smoke of the "sacred fire" flaring up into the blue sky from the portal of the temple, as the cheera-taghe would issue bearing the flame aloft, newly kindled in the opening year, and calling upon many assembled people to light therefrom their hearths, rekindling good resolutions and religious fervor for the future, and letting the faults of the unavailing past die out with the old year's fire; that he was to mark the clash of arms in the "beloved square," once more populous with the alert figures of warriors in martial array, making ready for the war-path; that he was to hear the joyful religious songs of greeting to the dawn, and the sonorous trumpeting of the conch-shells, as the vanished Indians of the "old waste town" would troop down at daybreak into the water of that bright stream where long ago they had been wont to plunge in their mystic religious ablutions. All this, however, the pack-men might see and hear, to believe the tradition of the day, in camping but a single night near the old "waste town."
And so anxious were these gay itinerant companies to see and hear nothing of such ghostly sort that whatever the stress of the weather, the mischances of the journey, the condition of the pack-animals, this vicinity was always distinguished by the longest day's travel of the whole route, and the camp was pitched at the extreme limit of the endurance of man and horse to compass distance from Nilaque Great. For believe what one might, the fact remained indisputable, that a decade earlier, when the place was inhabited, strange sounds were rife about the locality, the "sacred fire" was unkindled on the great "Sanctified Day," the two cheera-taghe of the town mysteriously disappeared, and their fate had remained a dark riddle.
One of these men, Oo-koo-koo, was well known in Charlestown. Both were of influence in the tribe, but often he had been specially chosen as one of the delegations of warriors and "beloved men" sent to wait in diplomatic conference on the Governor of South Carolina, to complain of injustice in the dealings of the licensed traders or the encroachments of the frontier settlers, or to crave the extension of some privilege of the treaty which the Cherokee tribe had lately made with the British government.
Two white men, who had become conspicuous in a short stay in the town of Nilaque Great, disappeared simultaneously, and the suspicion of foul dealing on their part against the cheera-taghe, which the Cherokee nation seemed disposed to entertain, threatened at one time the peace that was so precious to the "infant settlements," as the small, remote, stockaded stations of the Carolina frontiersmen were tenderly called.
Therefore the Governor of South Carolina, now a royal province,—the event occurred during the incumbency of Robert Johnson, who having acted in that capacity for the Lords Proprietors, well understood the menace of the situation,—busied himself with extreme diligence to discover the subsequent movements of the two white men, whose names were Terence O'Kimmon and Adrien L'Épine, in order to ascertain the fate of the cheera-taghe, and if evilly entreated, to bring the perpetrators of the deed to justice.
With a long, unguarded, open frontier such as his province presented to the incursions of the warlike and fierce Cherokees, who, despite their depopulating wars with other tribes, could still bring to the field six thousand braves from their sixty-four towns, the inhabitants of which were estimated at twenty thousand souls, he was by no means disposed to delay or to indulge doubts or to foster compatriot commiseration in meting out the penalty of the malefactors. The united militia of South Carolina and Georgia at this time numbered but thirty-five hundred rank and file, these colonies being so destitute of white men for the common defense that a memorial addressed to his majesty King George II. a little earlier than this event, bearing date April 9, 1734, pathetically states that "money itself cannot here raise a sufficient body of them." The search for the suspects, however, although long, exhaustive, and of such diligence as to convince the Indians of its sincerity of purpose, resulted fruitlessly. The government presently took occasion to made some valuable presents to the tribe, not as indemnity, for it could recognize no responsibility in the strange disaster, but for the sake of seeming to comply with the form of offering satisfaction for the loss, which otherwise the Indians would retaliate with massacre.