The plight of their Cherokee ancestors is revealed in the faces of Kweti and child in this photograph taken by James Mooney.
Smithsonian Institution
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.
