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.