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