As an incident of this war the same tradition relates how the Cherokee once approached a large Creek settlement “at the island on the Creek path,” in Tennessee river, opposite Guntersville, and, concealing their main force, sent a small party ahead to decoy the Creeks to an engagement. The Creek warriors at once crossed over in their canoes to the attack, when the Cherokee suddenly rose up from their ambush, and surrounded the Creeks and defeated them after a desperate battle. Then, taking the captured canoes, they went over to the island and destroyed all that was there. The great leader of the Cherokee in this war was a chief named Bullhead, renowned in tradition for his bravery and skill in strategy.[19] At about the same time, according to Wafford, the Cherokee claim to have driven the Creeks and Shawano from a settlement which they occupied jointly near Savannah, Georgia.
There was a tradition among the few old traders still living in upper Georgia in 1890 that a large tract in that part of the State had been won by the Cherokee from the Creeks in a ballplay.[20] There are no Indians now living in that region to substantiate the story. As originally told it may have had a veiled meaning, as among the Cherokee the expression “to play a ball game” is frequently used figuratively to denote fighting a battle. There seems to be no good ground for Bartram’s statement that the Cherokee had been dispossessed by the Creeks of the region between the Savannah and the Ocmulgee, in southwestern Georgia, within the historic period.[21] The territory is south of any traditional Cherokee claim, and the statement is at variance with what we know through history. He probably had in mind the Uchee, who did actually occupy that country until incorporated with the Creeks.
The victory was not always on one side, however, for Adair states that toward the end of the last war between the two tribes the Creeks, having easily defeated the Cherokee in an engagement, contemptuously sent against them a number of women and boys. According to this writer, the “true and sole cause” of this last war was the killing of some adopted relatives of the Creeks in 1749 by a party of northern Shawano, who had been guided and afterward sheltered by the Cherokee. The war, which he represents as a losing game for the Cherokee, was finally brought to an end through the efforts of the governor of South Carolina, with the unfortunate result to the English that the Creeks encouraged the Cherokee in the war of 1760 and rendered them very essential help in the way of men and ammunition.[22]
The battle of Tali′wă, which decided in favor of the Cherokee the long war between themselves and the Creeks, was fought about 1755 or a few years later at a spot on Mountain creek or Long-swamp creek, which enters Etowah river above Canton, Georgia, near where the old trail crossed the river about Long-swamp town. All our information concerning it is traditional, obtained from James Wafford, who heard the story when a boy, about the year 1815, from an old trader named Brian Ward, who had witnessed the battle sixty years before. According to his account, it was probably the hardest battle ever fought between the two tribes, about five hundred Cherokee and twice that number of Creek warriors being engaged. The Cherokee were at first overmatched and fell back, but rallied again and returned to the attack, driving the Creeks from cover so that they broke and ran. The victory was complete and decisive, and the defeated tribe immediately afterward abandoned the whole upper portion of Georgia and the adjacent part of Alabama to the conquerors. Before this battle the Creeks had been accustomed to shift about a good deal from place to place, but thereafter they confined themselves more closely to fixed home locations. It was in consequence of this defeat that they abandoned their town on Nottely river, below Coosa creek, near the present Blairsville, Georgia, their old fields being at once occupied by Cherokee, who moved over from their settlements on the head of Savannah river. As has been already stated, a peace was made about 1759, just in time to enable the Creeks to assist the Cherokee in their war with South Carolina. We hear little more concerning the relations of the two tribes until the Creek war of 1813–14, described in detail elsewhere; after this their histories drift apart.
The Yuchi or Uchee, called Ani′-Yu′tsĭ by the Cherokee, were a tribe of distinct linguistic stock and of considerable importance in early days; their territory bordered Savannah river on both sides immediately below the Cherokee country, and extended some distance westward into Georgia, where it adjoined that of the Creeks. They were gradually dispossessed by the whites, and were incorporated with the Creeks about the year 1740, but retain their separate identity and language to this day, their town being now the largest in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory.
According to the testimony of a Cherokee mixed-blood named Gansĕ′ʻtĭ or Rattling-gourd, who was born on Hiwassee river in 1820 and came west with his people in 1838, a number of Yuchi lived, before the Removal, scattered among the Cherokee near the present Cleveland, Tennessee, and on Chickamauga, Cohutta, and Pinelog creeks in the adjacent section of Georgia. They had no separate settlements, but spoke their own language, which he described as “hard and grunting.” Some of them spoke also Cherokee and Creek. They had probably drifted north from the Creek country before a boundary had been fixed between the tribes. When Tahlequah was established as the capital of the Cherokee Nation in the West in 1839 a few Yuchi were found already settled at the spot, being supposed to have removed from the East with some Creeks after the chief McIntosh was killed in 1825. They perished in the smallpox epidemic which ravaged the frontier in 1840, and their graves were still pointed out at Tahlequah in 1891. Shortly before the outbreak of the Civil war there was a large and prosperous Yuchi settlement on Cimarron river, in what was afterward the Cherokee strip.
Ramsey states that “a small tribe of Uchees” once occupied the country near the mouth of the Hiwassee, and was nearly exterminated in a desperate battle with the Cherokee at the Uchee Old Fields, in Rhea (now Meigs) county, Tennessee, the few survivors retreating to Florida, where they joined the Seminoles.[23] There seems to be no other authority for the statement.
Another broken tribe incorporated in part with the Creeks and in part with the Cherokee was that of the Na′ʻtsĭ, or Natchez, who originally occupied the territory around the site of the present town of Natchez in southern Mississippi, and exercised a leading influence over all the tribes of the region. In consequence of a disastrous war with the French in 1729–31 the tribe was disrupted, some taking refuge with the Chickasaw, others with the Creeks, either then or later, while others, in 1736, applied to the government of South Carolina for permission to settle on the Savannah river. The request was evidently granted, and we find the “Nachee” mentioned as one of the tribes living with the Catawba in 1743, but retaining their distinct language. In consequence of having killed some of the Catawba in a drunken quarrel they were forced to leave this region, and seem to have soon afterward joined the Cherokee, as we find them twice mentioned in connection with that tribe in 1755. This appears to be the last reference to them in the South Carolina records.[24]
Just here the Cherokee tradition takes them up, under the name of Anin′tsĭ, abbreviated from Ani′-Na′ʻtsĭ, the plural of Na′ʻtsĭ. From a chance coincidence with the word for pine tree, naʻtsĭ′, some English speaking Indians have rendered this name as “Pine Indians.” The Cherokee generally agree that the Natchez came to them from South Carolina, though some say that they came from the Creek country. It is probable that the first refugees were from Carolina and were joined later by others from the Creeks and the Chickasaw. Bienville states, in 1742, that some of them had gone to the Cherokee directly from the Chickasaw when they found the latter too hard pressed by the French to be able to care for them.[25] They seem to have been regarded by the Cherokee as a race of wizards and conjurers, a view which was probably due in part to their peculiar religious rites and in part to the interest which belonged to them as the remnant of an extirpated tribe. Although we have no direct knowledge on the subject, there is every reason to suppose that the two tribes had had communication with each other long before the period of the Natchez war.
According to the statement of James Wafford, who was born in 1806 near the site of Clarkesville, Ga., when this region was still Indian country, the “Notchees” had their town on the north bank of Hiwassee, just above Peachtree creek, on the spot where a Baptist mission was established by the Rev. Evan Jones in 1821, a few miles above the present Murphy, Cherokee county, North Carolina. On his mother’s side he had himself a strain of Natchez blood. His grandmother had told him that when she was a young woman, perhaps about 1755, she once had occasion to go to this town on some business, which she was obliged to transact through an interpreter, as the Natchez had been there so short a time that only one or two spoke any Cherokee. They were all in the one town, which the Cherokee called Gwalʻgâ′hĭ, “Frog place,” but he was unable to say whether or not it had a townhouse. In 1824, as one of the census takers for the Cherokee Nation, he went over the same section and found the Natchez then living jointly with the Cherokee in a town called Gûʻlăni′yĭ at the junction of Brasstown and Gumlog creeks, tributary to Hiwassee, some 6 miles southeast of their former location and close to the Georgia line. The removal may have been due to the recent establishment of the mission at the old place. It was a large settlement, made up about equally from the two tribes, but by this time the Natchez were not distinguishable in dress or general appearance from the others, and nearly all spoke broken Cherokee, while still retaining their own language. As most of the Indians had come under Christian influences so far as to have quit dancing, there was no townhouse. Harry Smith, who was born about 1820, father of the late chief of the East Cherokee, also remembers them as living on Hiwassee and calling themselves Na′ʻtsĭ.