TELL THEM THEY LIE: THE SEQUOYAH MYTH by TRAVELLER BIRD

TELL THEM THEY LIE

THE SEQUOYAH MYTH by TRAVELLER BIRD

Westernlore Publishers, 1971 Los Angeles

Acknowledgments: THE PREPARATION OF this biography on my direct blood ancestor,

George Guess, alias Sequoyah was a tremendous undertaking and has not been

accomplished alone.

In the winter of 1961, we the seventeen direct heirs met in a cabin on the North

Carolina Cherokee reservation to plan and work on this book. Two of us live in

the United States; the other fifteen live in Mexico. We speak, read and write

our native language in three of the six dialects. This book is an attempt by

the direct heirs of George Guess to correct histprical guesswork. Who George

Guess was and what he did for his people will be chronicled in this book,

contradictory to all literature notwithstanding.

All unpublished documents quoted in this book are in the collection of the

author and the other sixteen heirs apparent of George Guess.

In translating Cherokee documents, we have employed the modern Cherokee system

of orthography to equate with the English language. An interlinear translation

and spelling in English does not equate with that in the Cherokee syllabary.

Most of the old Indian manner of speaking had to be sacrificed in order to

achieve modern day readability. Words in brackets and parenthesis are mine,

except those quoted from colonial newspaper articles. We have chosen not to

translate other Indian tribal names, leaving them by their European given titles

for the reader's clarity.

I wish to express my deep appreciation to members of the Original Cherokee

Community Organization of Eastern Oklahoma for their assistance and valuable

suggestions. Also, last, but certainly not least, to my friend, the late Clyde

Warrior I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude. Before his untimely death in

1968, this Indian warrior encouraged and assisted the seventeen heirs to take

this

one great step to restore our ancestor's fullblood heritage for the sake of

future historians of Cherokee history. His research made possible certain

government documents necessary in the prepamfion of this book. As for my own

thoughts as they reveal themselves throughout the hook, I apologize to no one.

TRAVELLER BIRD

Contents

Acknowledgements v

Introduction 11

Chapter 1- THE DEVIL'S GANG PLACE

Chapter 2- FLAMES IN THE MOUNTMNS 29

Chapter 3- WARRIOR REVENGE, AND A NEW NAME. 39

Chapter 4- MARRIAGE AND THE PEACE ~ .. 49

Chapter 5- THE UPSETTERS 6i

Chapter 6- CHEROKEE FALL 69

Chapter 7- THE TEACHER AND WESTWARD FOOTSTEPS 79

Chapter 8- RETURN TO THE OLD NATION 91

Chapter 9- BRANDED 99

Chapter io-THE CONSPIRACY 111

Chapter 11-INDIAN TURMOIL IN THE WEST 121

Chapter 12- A BUFFALO ROBE OF inS OWN 131

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 143

Index 145

Illustrations

PAGE

Who is this man? Frontis.

A copy of the original 92-Symbol Cherokee Syllabary 18

Photocopy from the supposed Army record of George Guess 6o

Photocopy from the supposed Army record of George Guess 90

Photocopy of the i8i6 Treaty with the United States 97

Photocopy of the i8i6 Treaty (lower portion) 98

Photocopy of the 1828 Treaty with the United States 119

Indians crossing a river in the West 120

Affidavit to establish Bounty Land Claim for Sally Guess 130

Introduction: For A QUARTER of a century - from the year 1821 until 1845 -

Sequoyah's name appeared intermittently in the missionary tracts, local and

national newspapers throughout the United States and Europe.

Invention of Letters By A Cherokee Indian. It appears that an Indian, of the

name of See-quah-yah is the inventor under such disadvantageous circumstances as

render him, in our humble opinion, one of the most extraordinary men that the

world has produced. The Universities and other learned societies in Europe would

be only doing common justice to Seequahyah in granting to him the highest

literary distinctions... 1

His life had, in the press, the beat of a spectacular serial story. Over and

over again, the discovery of the Cherokee syllabary by the American press and

public in 1825 proclaimed Sequoyah a Cadmus and the bastard son of a white man

who traded with the Cherokees east of the Mississippi River during the middle of

the eighteenth century.

Like sainthood stories of that period, nothing about Sequoyah's life was known

to the press and the American public, except for

1 Londan Courier, reprinted in the New York American, Vol. IX, No.970; June 8,

1830.

the "made-up" information that the missionaries and the progressive leaders

desired to become known. The missionaries wrote an episode in Cherokee history,

and they wrote it to fit their purpose. They twisted the facts to fit the

picture desired. They tagged their fake name "Sequoyah" - a Taliwa tribal name,

and made George Gue~s the helpful "hero" to their civilization movement, knowing

that this Cherokee could do nothing about it. The formal English name of George

Guess is correct.

Sequoyah was a fighting warrior-scribe of twenty-six on that night in 1792 when

the great war chief of his people's faction was shot down. He was known to all

his tribesmen by his given name "Sogwili," meaning "Horse" in the Cherokee

language. The word Sequoyah is meaningless in Cherokeean. But by the end of

those crushing wars of 1794 - the Cherokee fall, and on into the first quarter

of the nineteenth century, his fake name of Sequoyah was to become a symbol of

intellectual achievement in an American Indian society outside the Cherokee

Nation. Inside the nation, east of the Mississippi River, Sequoyah's name for

two decades was a "mark" of resistance to the progressive New Order movement of

mixed-blood leaders, and friendly Cherokee traitors toward Anglo-Christian

civilization.

Indian Sequoyah was unable to challenge the press, missionaries, and the

Cherokee leaders' "two-faced" fallacy, since non-conforming Cherokees were

considered savages. In October 1816, Sequoyah was caught and tried before a

general council of mixed-blood judges, Cherokee police, and warrior chiefs in

the New Order of the Cherokee Nation. He was charged with witchcraft and

encouraging his mountain clansmen in Tennessee and North Carolina to emigrate to

the West beyond the limits of the United States - to his settlement on the

Brazos River, in what is today Texas.

The Cherokee General Council convicted Sequoyah for witchcraft. The conviction

was an excuse by the ruling leaders to set an example before the Cherokee people

of the "power" of the New Order adopted from the white man's Christian

civilization program.

Sequoyah was branded on the forehead and back. So was his wife. His fingers on

both hands were cut off between the first and second joints, leaving the stubs

and his thumbs. His ears were cropped off, the "mark" of a traitor to the

Cherokee Nation in the southeast for anyone desiring, and encouraging removal

of the people to the West. In the fall of 1816, he and his wife barely escaped

from their tormentors with their lives.

The syllabary had publicly been used since 1795 as a "weapon" to block the

"great experiment" forced upon the Cherokees by the United States government in

order to control and civilize the Indians by the Anglo-American social

standards. As early as 1806, the leaders and the missionaries had seen the

Cherokee marks (symbols) written on homes, barns, fences, trees, leaves, rocks,

and dirt roadways by those trusted conservatives living in the mountains of

Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. They had seen the Cherokees and their

children reading the marks. But the superstitious whites and mixed-bloods

believed them to be the work of Indian children or sorcerers. Perhaps most

important was the United States government's knowledge of the syllabary since

1791.

The nation split wide open in 1806, and the conservative Cherokees resisted the

teachings of the missionaries and their fault findings. The conservative leaders

of the nation's faction signed treaties with the United States; ceded lands in

the old na-tion east of the Mississippi for new lands west of the Mississippi,

newly acquired by the United States in its purchase of the Louisiana Territory.

In the fall of 1816, a letter written in the syllabary by Sequoyah to his

halflblood brother, Whitepath, was accidentally intercepted by the Cherokee

police or socalled "Light-Horse Guard" of the nation. Whitepath was forced to

read the contents of the corn shuck letter to the leaders and missionaries, and

to take them and the Cherokee police to the North Carolina mountains where

Sequoyah was staying with his inlaws and his new wife.

It was in the North Carolina mountains, at the village of Sequoyah's father-in-

law, Tsatsi Ughvi, that the Cherokee lead-

ers first tried Sequoyah, and learned that many thousands of Cherokees wrote and

read in their native language. The leaders then began to believe there was such

a mode of Cherokee mark writing and reading. But the idea of a Cherokee native

method of writing and reading was rejected and fought by the missionaries living

in the nation, who felt that anything of Indian origin was repugnant and savage.

These white missionaries came to the Cherokee Nation to stamp out Indian

heritage and culture, and they meant to do exactly that.

The white missionaries, thinking they were a superior race, could not afford to

let mere Indian pagans outwit them and the United States Government's great

civilization prQgram. Therefore, until 1821, the Cherokee syllabary was

concealed from the American public, even though a majority of the fullblood

conservatives were writing and reading their own native language. These rejected

the teachings of the missionaries to become like the whites, for the language

and ways of the foreigners was the destroyer of their inheritance and tribal

life.

In 1816, a tangled web began in the life 0£ George Guess, alias Sequoyah, when

he was caught, tried, and convicted; a web that would indirectly cause the

death, slavery, exile and a Cherokee guerrilla war in the Southeastern, as well

as the Western Cherokee Nation of thousands of Cherokees during the first and

second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Sequoyah was a fullblood Indian of the Cherokee, Taliwa and Tasgigi Tribes who

desired to remain Indian, and to hold fast to his tribal heritage and cultural

teachings. Nearly six feet tall, he was a rugged man, with a keen knowledge and

memory.

In 1797, Sequoyah led a group of emigrant Cherokees beyond the sovereignty of

the United States - lands beyond the Red River ruled by Spain. This decision to

leave the homelands of his ancestors was to protect his nonconforming people

from destruction as a tribal people. He refused to make peace and acknowledge

the United States Government's forced "great experimental" civilization program

upon himself, and his people near the end of the eighteenth century, when the

govCrnment's armies finally crushed the resisting Cherokee fighting forces.

The armies of the "new guardian" government had so reduced the Cherokee Nation

to a state of poverty and death of its fighting leaders that it was shattered.

They gloated over the helpless conditions of the Cherokees. Stripping the

Indians of everything, the government sought to take away their dignity, self

respect, and further land cessions by regulated credit trade - dependency. White

man's'ethics were rammed down their throats in the name of conformity, and to

destroy tribal life-ways.

Truly, Sequoyah was different from his reticent tribesmen. He was not a "good

little Indian" who smiled, nodded, and remained silent. He had the guts to stand

and face the conquering for-eigners who were taking his people's life and their

homelands. He was cruel to those who threatened new changes for himself and his

mountain conservatives. But most of all, he hated the fullbloods - "white

Indians" who turned their backs on their own people, heritage, and followed the

Anglo civilization. His devotion to his wives, children, clansmen and tribe was

deep -a devotion that only Indians know and understand. He was a fighter, a

contributor of deeds, for Indians are taught and expected to contribute to the

well-being of their clan and tribe.

Sequoyah gained his training, skills, and knowledge from the cradle - from the

elder ones, fighting leaders, and chosen scribes of the eighteenth century who

dared not quit and give up their lands to the white invasion. These Cherokee

fighters were to become known in Cherokee history as the "hostiles" or outlaws.

They fought violently until their great leader, Dragging Canoe, and most of his

assistant chiefs were killed by the white armies in 1794. 4. Many Cherokee

leaders and warriors influenced the early life of Sequoyah, but none had the

molding of the boy's life more than the great war chief of the Cherokee Nation's

f6ction, Dragging Canoe (Tsiyogunsi).2 Thirty nine years of Sequoyah's early

life was lived in his beloved mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. Among

the documents which he left that escaped the fires of his enemies

2 The Cherokee meaning of this word is, "the Otter lifts it." Commonly referred

to in literature as Dragging Canoe.

(and he had many) - are those handwritten and handprinted ledger hooks of his

eight children. These present a picture of a gifted, sensitive and strong man

who began life in July 1766 in a brushcovered dirt floor summer Osi 3 in a

Cherokee settlement in the North Carolina mountains.

In 1871, two grandchildren of Sequoyah's daughter Gedi, living in the United

States, sent their grandmother a copy of Harper's Magazine, dated 1870, which

contained an article and the supposed picture of Sequoyah and the syllabary.

These children asked their grandmother many questions about that article and

picture. She wrote to them, saying:.

... Now, the people that write in the newspapers Phoenix and Advocate, and

Harper's book are pretender liars. That which I say to you my grandchildren is

duyughodv (right, just) about my father Sogwali and your grandfather.

That picture I saw of that man they call Sogwali (Sequoyah) in Harper's book is

a joke. That is not the picture of your grandfather Sogwali. That is not the way

he looked. My father Sogwali had no ears, no long fingers. They cut off. That

picture is a fraud. That man is Thomas Maw. Just like that paper that Thomas Maw

is holding in his hand is not the right one. The writing is not right. Just like

what the Rulers say in that book, Laws of the Tsalagi (Cherokee)4. They say my

father went to Washington City, and signed a paper with the unegvs (whites).

They say he went to the meetings when all the people come West. Signed his name

there on their paper. They are liars. He was never in Washington City. He not go

to council in June 1839. He dead. My father Sogwali not live in Indian

Territory. He live in Mexican lands with others of our people in Texas where I

was born.

... He not give our people that which they have... He teach them. Now, my father

Sogwali was no more the son of a white person, than I am the daughter of a black

person. No, they lie. Any fool can make a mark and say Indian did it. Not so! My

father Sogwali not intend our writings be for the whites and traitors to use and

learn....

3 Cone-shaped and completely clay-covered, the winter Osi was used by the

Cherokees for a sleep house. The summer one was primary used for the birth of

children.

4 See Laws of the Cherokee Nation, Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation (C.N.). Cherokee

Advocate Office, 1852.

The events that shaped Sequoyah's life and the action he took as he grew up,

began in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. For that reason, it is

necessary to return to that period in this history.

One

THE DEVIL'S GANG PLACE

THE CHEROKEES WERE a highly civilized tribe by the end of the seventeenth

century, with an organized government that included many chiefs and priests.

United with the great Appalachia confederacy during the fifteenth century, the

tribe had created its own method of writing and reading, which was comparable to

that of the white invaders. This symbol system had been used by the tribe for

nine summers before European invasion on Gvana-hani (San Salvador Island).

The Peace Chief held the title of Amedohi-The Water Traveler, often recorded in

literature as Moytoy. His council consisted of seven Beloved Men who were elder

statesmen, each of whom represented his respective clan. The Peace Chief

presided over the council, who concerned themselves with the management of

lands, the public granary, and laws of a general nature.

The most influential Peace Chief of the nation was one chsen by the people who

was also a religious leader. He chose his own successor, subject to council

approval, and he had veto power over the selection of the War Chief.

All land was owned by the Cherokee Nation, and it was parcelled out to family

groups according to their individual needs. There was no rental fee.

Agricultural products were given to the public granary on a voluntary basis, and

was then used for the needy. Widows, orphans and old persons were provided for,

and there were no taxes levied.

Cherokee women had many rights and privileges other than domestic duties. Not

only did married women own property,

such as homes, horses, cattle and fields of growing crops and fruit trees, but

they also participated in both the fighting of wars and the Council of War, and

sat with the Civil Council of Peace. Lineage was traced through the Women's

clan.

The most powerful Cherokee village during the eighteenth century was ItsOdi

(Chota), often called the City of Refuge. It was the religious center and the

original headquarter5 of the Ani-wodi Clan, whose specialization was the

Priesthood. But to say that Chota was the capital of the nation is like saying

that Lon-don is the capital of the earth, and that the Bishop is the King. Next

to Chota in power was the village of Sogwiligigageihiyi, the headquarters of the

Scribe Society referred to by the Anglos as Serowee, Soquee, Skeequoyah, or the

Devil's Gang Place. 1

After the Appalachia confederacy was shattered in 1716, due to traders'

knowledge of Cherokee religious rituals and the powers of the Peace Chief and

the Women, an enterprising Englishman by the name of Sir Alexander Cuming came

to Chota in the Cherokee Nation in the spring of 1730 to pawn thirteen Cherkee

women and children, kidnaped Slaves, to their relatives, and a quantity of guns,

ammunition and other presents to the Keta-gustah 2 - the Peace Chief. Among the

thirteen Cherokee slaves was one of Chief Tsamasgula's wives, and three of his

children.

There were many days and nights of great feasting, speeches and dancing in

gratitude for the return of the slaves to their relatives. The whiskey jugs and

barrels of white traders were emptied, and bellies were bloated with the

sweetened foul-tasting water.

On the night of March 13, 1730, while a group of the Indians were assembled at

Chota, Sir Alexander Cuming prevailed upon Chief Tsamasgula to drink to His

Britannic Majesty on bended

1 So~called by the whites during the eighteenth century who referred to the

Cherokee symbol writings as "the scratchings of the Devil -Skeenab." Hence

George Guess's fake name. The remnant Taliwa Tribe incorporated with the

Cherokees during the fifteenth century, and. brought their symbol Writings with

them. Descendants of this tribe were often called Saloquoyah, Skeequo-yah, or

Soquee. The Taliwa tribal word means two" in their language. In Cherokeean, the

word "Sequoyah" is meaningless.

2 Uguwiyuhi is the Cherokee term for chief, ruler, king, or anyone with great

authority.

knee as he and Ludovick Grant, a trader were doing - to thank the English King

for returning his people whom Cuming said the English had rescued from the

French. This strange white man ceremony Cuming regarded as the Peace Chief's

acknowl-edgment of King George's sovereignty over them. With this much success

Cuming persuaded the drunk chief to relinquish his enormous ceremonial white

heron feather headdress, and his chieftainship, to appoint Attakullakulla, 3 the

English educated half-breed, as "Super-Chief" and himself as Emperor and advisor

to govern the wh4e Cherokee Nation - the white man's scheme to become viceroy of

the Cherokee Nation.

Surprise, anger and jealousy arose among the various village chiefs when Cuming

had Attakullakulla installed as "Super-Chief" at Nequassee (Nunegwasi).

Attakullakulla's mother was a Lumbee-Cherokee woman who had no clanspeople. She

had married a white man by the name of John Carpenter.

Each white nation's king made it a policy of his colonist governor and his

agents to kidnap and send hack to that particular white nation a number of

Indian slaves. These were educated and instructed in the white man's mode of

civilization in order to further negotiations between the whites and Indian

tribes they could not conquer. "Fuse the blood of the two races" be-came the

byword of the Anglos, and there were many Cherokees named Prince Philip, Prince

George, Princess Ann and Princess Marie Louise.

It became apparent to the whites, as well as to the fullbloods, that mixed-blood

loyalties and sympathies lay in their direction. The practice of white-sired

Cherokees of Indian slaves was a method employed by the Anglos to divide and

conquer. This led to hatred and jealousies within the tribe, and to mixed-blood

ap pointed chiefs. So the Cherokee fullbloods formed their own united and

private

fuflblood organization - Anisunoi, of the Seven Clan Society, which excluded

mixed-blood Cherokees.

3 Atagvnahila, called by the conservative Cherokees Tsalagidihi (Cherokee

killer) because of his love and loyalty to the whites, and his spying activities

among his own people for the benefit of himself and the Anglos.

To show the conquest of the Cherokee Nation and to obtain his viceroyship,

Cuming took Attakullakulla and six chosen mixed-blood Cherokees to England in

1730, where they were entertained, and the Cherokees signed a peace treaty of

alliance and trade with the English. After their return to the Cherokee Nation,

for two years Cuming, and his Jesuit missionaries, reorganized the Cherokee

government, and directed his "Super-Chief", Attakullakulla in the political

affairs of the Cherokee Nation. In turn Attakullakulla bribed fifteen village

chiefs to follow him, and to become allies to the English. But he knew that the

Cherokees would follow the most wise and strongest leader. Indeed he was the

pet' and bribed figurehead of the colonist governors of Carolina and Virginia.

Like kernels of corn shelled one by one from a large cob, the Cherokee Nation

broke into bits. Their organized government fell apart.

The early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were those of Indian

extermination wherever the Anglo desired important Indian lands. Cherokee lands

were not only important to the whites for trade routes from the southeast to the

southwest to the Gulf, and west to the Mississippi River, but also for the

minerals - gold, silver, copper and lead.

Whenever the Anglos could not force the Cherokees into alliance and s&talled

land~eding treaties, a pretext was found by the colonists and their armies to

come into the Cherokee Nation, rape their women burn their villages, kill both

the old and young, friendly and' hostile, and take others into slavery. Cherokee

warriors who retaliated were hunted down by the whites with men and trained

dogs.

A common practice of the conqueror was to set the woods afire to flush out the

savages, and to burn them out.

Cherokee extermination is given in the records of a scribe born in 1677, and

dying during the Yamasi War of 1715. Writing on white goat skin, he relates his

experiences and that of a clansman, Utsawi:

... The dogs I hear. Utsawi sees them coming to cave. I stand in cave entrance,

bow in hands. Utsawi has gun. I see many men, white, brown, and black persons

coming with dogs. Running. I shoot two

dogs. Utsawi shoot dogs. White, brown, and black persons come. Shoot guns where

we stand. Tell dogs: Go, go go! Utsawi and me run to cave in river. Hide. Men

come. Shoot in water, not find. Go away. In the fal1 of 1779, the Indian

settlement of Redhorse, 4 birthplace of Sequoyah, remained unconquered. Half the

forty~ix villages throughout the Cherokee Nation could boast as much during the

last sixty years of the white invasion, and the devastating wars to gain a

foothold of southern Indian trade, alliance and lands.

Young Warrior (Gvlihuanida), the village chief, fought back the white intruders

who were vying for his vfllage trade alliance, and who had their eyes on his

valuable lands with trained wolves, skflled scouts and gunmen, and a fleet of

canoes on the villager's river. These invaders were like wild hogs, with snouts

in good acorn ground, rooting and pushing. From his father, Long Warrior, and

the Red Organization of the Warrior Society, he had learned judgment and Indian

strategy in the counter attack.

Isolated like an island, when the French and English began fighting each other

during the middle 1750s, Young Warrior and his villagers were just one of the

Cherokee settlements throughout the vast Cherokee Nation - which included parts

of the states now known as Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia,

the whole of Tennessee and Kentucky to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers - who

used Indian judgment in staying out of the white man's wars. He united his

warrior forces under the leadership of the great War Chief of the nation's

faction, Dragging Canoe, in an effort to hold back the Anglo invasion.

Under the leadership of Dragging Canoe, the Cherokee fighting faction had one

ace in the h4e - an effective weapon. This weapon was the Gohwelodi 5 - the

secret written symbols which represented parts of ~lables of the Cherokee

language. It could be written anywhere - on trees, rocks, leaves and the earth.

It sent messages to tribesmen living in parts of seven states, which

4 In the Cherokee language, Sogwiligigageiyi means Redhorse Place - after the

scribe of the village Redhorse, who was Sequoyah's father. The village was

located on Sumac River in Rutherford County, North Carolina. Commonly referred

to in literature as Soquee, Serowee, Skeequoyah, and Talohtefke.

5 "To write, one," a scribe.

was their nation. Yet, it could not be read by the Anglos, nor enemy Indians. It

first had to be deciphered. Only the Cherokee scribes could translate their

writings.

Sequoyah's father, Sogwiligigagei was one of the chosen scribes of the Anisahoni

Clan,6 and a member of the Seven Clan Scribe Society. Different clans were noted

for their ability to handle various types of responsibilities. The Anisahoni

Clan specialized in script, although members of the Seven Clan Scribe Society

were chosen from all seven of the Cherokee Clans who had the ancient Taliwa

blood and the superior learning and memory ability. By the beginning of the

eighteenth century, it excluded the mixed-bloods and the friendly traitors.

The Seven Clan Scribe Society realized, early in the eighteenth century, that in

order to protect their lands, they must learn what the white man said - his

language and all about his papers called "treaties." They agreed to try to learn

the foreign language in order to outwit, and combat the foreigners.

Cherokee scribes learning the white man's language would be ironical, except for

one thing - the tribe had, by 1700, one hundred and sixty years' association

with the Anglos. First the Spanish, then the French and English. Each white

nation's colonist governor set up his own missionary projects, and his own

scheme to convert the "heathens."

Some of the friendly Indians from the different tribes fell for the sweetened

water, and the words of the black robe priest or the missionary and his Good

Black Book. But the fullblood conservative Cherokees valued their own religious

beliefs and rites of the Ancient One Above, and could not understand the white

priest or missionary words of a God who would punish people in the burning fires

of hell they talked about for the wrongs called "sins." It didn't make good

sense to the Cherokees, for the whites continually committed wrongs against

their own, their black people, as well as Indians, and the Cherokees thought the

foolish white priest and preacher's mind were confused by the

6 Anisahoni is one of the seven clans of the Cherokees which means "feline." No

Cherokee will accept "Blue" as the clan translation. Some of the clan names as

they appear in literature are mistranslated.

evil spirits. The Indians could certainly see that wherever the glory seekers

went in Indian country, they destroyed Indian religious rituals, and paved the

way for other whites to conquer and exploit. These "good men" preached peace and

brotherhood, and in the same breath endorsed slavery, and wars of their nation.

Although the Cherokee scribes knew that Indian converts could teach them 'the

white man's language, these Christian Indians were encouraged to "go teach their

heathen brothers."

One teacher was a northern Indian by the Cherokee name of Hogshooter. He and his

three able assistants taught Sequoyah's father, Young Warrior, and the Scribe

Society the Latin, French, and English languages, even though there were in them

a concoction of dialect forms. Another Florida Indian priest, named Contri by

his Spanish conquerer, taught them Spanish.

After many years of work and study, a few Cherokees of the Scribe Society were

able to master the foreign language, and could listen to the white man's talk,

though they pretended not to understand what was said.

The Scribe Society taught the young boys not only their own native written

syllabary, but also the three foreign languages. The scribes used a dictionary

for each particular language, given to them by converted Christian Indians. Boy

scribes were chosen from each of the seven Clans to take the elder scribe's

place when going out with the warriors to fight the enemy, and to record the

deeds of their people who were kflled or taken by the enemy.

Although the Cherokees had their own written language, oral story telling was an

art and necessity. The Indian's method of teaching was to instill in the child a

desire to become a good speaker, a brave warrior, a strong and wise leader, and

a study of nature and tribal history.

Indian children were taught from birth. Each child participated in every phase

of tribal life. The tragic conditions which threatened the lives of their people

were understood by even the smallest children.

Sequoyah was born in a time of Cherokee war and constant turmoil, not only with

the white conquerer, but also with other Indian neighbor tribes whom the Anglos

paid to help break

down the fighting Cherokees. His Cherokee-Taliwa wisp of a mother, Lisi, had

fought on the borders of the nation and the bloody battlefields within the

nation by the side of her Cherokee-Tasgigi husband Sogwiligigagei. She had

distinguished herself many times through her bravery in capturing enemy Indians,

and drawing the Anglo enemy into ambush, where the warriors waited to annihilate

them. For her bravery, and also because she was a Dasgidigi (medicine woman),

she attained the rank of Agiyvgvga - Beloved Woman.

Indeed, as Sequoyah grew up he acquired warrior skills as well as being chosen a

scribe, learning to keep the records of the Aniwahhya (Wolf) Clan, of which his

mother was a member.

In the fall of 1778, Lumbee Indians, whom the Cherokees called "Slave Catchers,"

escorted a white trader by the name of Butler over the Indian mountain path to

their village. They led a train of horses tied tail to tail, and packed high

with foreign goods. A bell tinkled around the neck of the lead horse to let the

Cherokee villagers and their tame white wolves know that white traders were

coming with new and better goods than that which they had been traded with

various Indian traders throughout the north and southwest. "I sell cheap,"

Butler told each Cherokee village he visited.

But Young Warrior told trader Butler: "I only talk with Indian traders. As for

the whites, where they live, I have nothing to say to them, and they shall never

come here."

With this unexpected blast of Cherokee talk, the trader thought he could get

around the scribe of Sogwiligigagei village to talk more favorably on Cherokee

trade business. What Sequ~ yah's father Redhorse told trader Butler confirmed

the thinking of Young Warrior. He said to Butler: "Where the white man walks, my

people disappear. We have nothing to trade to the whites."

Trader Butler was red-faced and angry. He shook his fist at both Cherokees, and

said: "By God, you GM' damned red bastards will break. Our armies will come here

to these mountains with guns, and your people will all die. Your villages will

burn

to the ground like the others. You will hear my words again, you red Skeequoyahs

- Devils."

The Indian trade was a business with the Anglos. Each European nation played

against the other in the contest for the Indian continent. The English vied

against the French and Spanish people. The Indians were caught fighting in the

middle, trying to carry on trade with their own Indian traders, hundreds and

even thousands of miles away.

For the most part, Indian to Indian traders were curtailed and put out of

existence by the mid-eighteenth century. Yet, there were still some few in the

southwest and northeast who came by canoes, bringing not only their own trade

goods, but Aso those foreign made goods that Indian traders obtained from the

French and Spanish people.

The Spanish learned from the Indian traders in Florida, and on the coast of what

is now Texas, that the Cherokees traded their sacred gold to Indians. Since gold

was what the Spanish wanted, they gladly trained their Indian trader vassals the

technique of trading for gold in exchange for their germ-infested merchandise.

By 1780, there were only six mountain Cherokee villages remaining in the nation

where gold could easily be taken out of the ground and streams. Nuggets,

sometimes as large as a quail's egg were washed out by flood waters Aong the

creeks and rivers where these villages were located. Redhorse village was one

where gold, the gift of the Earth Mother, had been taken for Cherokee rites for

more than a thousand years.

For more than fifteen years, during the middle of the eighteenth century, the

Cherokee village of Sogwiligigageihi had become well-known to the South Carolina

colonists. The following article appeared in the Boston Gazette on May 22, 1763

- A Report From Charles Town:

... The Talk From the Standing Turkey is full of Pretences. That he is desirous

of Peace; that all things past may be forgot, and trade restored and carried on

in the usual manner; that every thing was now quiet over the Hill; that he had

indeed heard a Noise of Guns and went to see what was the Matter, and was very

much surprised to find

the young People firing at Turkeys (Tufkegee, Fort Loudoun) that after four days

he bid them be quiet, and all Differences should now be forgotton; that he had

sent for all Parties out at War to come in, and was desirous of burying the

Hatchet, &,&,&. The String of Wampum has one black Bead on it, which he desires

may be thrown away by the Governor, as it represents the Young Warrior of

Skeequoyah, (Serowee, Devil's Gang Place) whom he blames for the present

Disturbances. At the same time that this Peace-Talk is come, we hear of the

scalping Gangs of Cherokees being more numerous than ever, and extending in the

Settlements from the Little Saloquoyah quite to Salibury in North Carolina....

Two

FLAMES IN THE MOUNTAINS

IN THE SPRING of 1779, the two Cherokee factions had three things to show for

more than two centuries of dealing with the whites: Their nation had been

whittled in size by many millions of acres in fiction treaties with the English

colonist - the biggest slice of land having been ceded to Richard Henderson and

Nathaniel Hart. This tract of land is today the states of Kentucky and

Tennessee. Almost half of the Cherokees had died from "planted" germ-infested

traders' merchandise and wars with the Anglos.

Their war-torn nation sported two former English forts 7 trader's villages

dotted the nation, English and rebel American government agents, white squaw men

and women - citizens of the na-tion who had obtained their citizenship by

marrying a friendly's daughter, sister, or brother; white squatters living on

lands not ceded, rogues looking for a place to escape and for the excitement of

stirring up trouble among the Cherokees, and public roads which criss~rossed the

nation from the four cardinal points. All these conquests that the Anglos had

been able to achieve was due to the superb feat of the white's trained spy and

figurehead, Attakullakulla, and his paid followers.

Time after time, the Aniwahhya Clan sent out its selected warriors to eliminate

Attakullakulla, only to find that he was too well guarded in one of the Anglo's

forts, or his own Fort Attakullakulla on the Little Tennessee River. Even when

he left the forts, he was always protected by a white guard of ten men who

escorted him from place to place in the nation and the white setilements.

The Cherokees living in the remote mountain coves of Tennessee, North Carolina,

and Georgia were not about to give up their homelands to the invading Anglos.

Spring was a time of planting - of going to school with nature. While groups of

women, girls, and boys planted the plowed fields in corn, beans, peas, cotton

and melons, armed guards of young boys and old men were posted day and night on

the mountain ridges surrounding the villages and the paths leading down to their

homes. Everyone worked, even the smallest child helped its mother or father in

whatever each was doing.

One of Sequoyah's duties was that of night guarding the mountain path leading

down to his village.

The drive and warning to break the Cherokees given to Young Warrior and

Sogwiligigagei by trader Butler in the fall of 1778, came as true as the wild

turkeys going to their roosting place each night in the tall pines at the foot

of the Big Mountains.

Colonist armies came in the month of April (Guwoni) 1779, as they had in

previous years by the easy-to-reach water routes along the Big Tennessee, Saluda

and Chattahoochee Rivers, leaving the stockade fort of Attakullakulla safe.

Every Cherokee village throughout the Big Mountains was full of refugees -

brothers and sisters and their families fleeing the white armies with their big

iron guns, the dead and burning villages left behind them. Running to the one

place of safety, which had in times past, protected them from their enemies -

the Big Mountains.

Among the eleven villages destroyed in the spring of 1779 was one belonging to

the great and beloved War Chief of the nation 5 faction, Dragging Canoe, and

those villages of his assistant chiefs located within five to eight miles of

each other on the Cherokee River Lthe Holston of the whites]. Dragging Canoe and

his clansmen sought sanctuary with their brothers and sisters in Sogwiligigagei

village, and other mountain Villages

This giant of a man and war chief was the guiding strength and hope of his

peoples' faction. He was a man of action and

strong words. His deep and smoldering resentment over the years of being

swindled out of ancestral lands, and the political assassination of his father

Gvlihudhanisi (Tennessee Warrior) whom the little spy Attakullakulla pointed out

to the governor of South Carolina in 1761, led to friction and bad feelings

within the factions. Like his father, he had the judgment and guts to stand up

to the conquering Anglos and their friendly and paid puppets. To them, he was

the dust in their eyes.

There was much anger and uneasiness about the white man's destruction of

Cherokee villages; about the land ceding treaties made by the white appointed

chiefs living in the stockade built villages, called by the whites "Peace

Towns," along the upper reaches of the Big Tennessee and Saluda Rivers. There

was much flossip among the women of the village who, like hornets when their

nest is torn up by wild hogs, demanded their men and women warriors fight back

the whites and protect their homelands.

During the month of October (Duninodhi) 1779, a council was held in

Sogwiligigagei Village in the newly erected, large seven-sided council house of

all the village chiefs, and their warriors from the thirty-two fighting villages

throughout the nation. They were advised by Young Warrior to come to the council

to hear the "talk" of their great war leader, Dragging Canoe, and to decide what

to do about their appointed White Chief of Ithe whole nation, Attakullakulla,

and his unauthorized and continual ceding of their lands, and constant spying to

the for-eigners.

In the firelit council house, among the seven boy scribes who sat in the far

back row in space assigned to his clan, the Aniwahhya, was the boy

Tahlontisoge,1 son of Sogwiligigagei, the village scribe. He was called by all

in the village Sogwili, which means "horse" in Cherokeean. In the years that

followed, this boy's name was to become changed by the whites, and become the

hated symbol of resistance to the foreigners' teachings.

Only thirteen, his scalplock (guedla) almost reached his tall father's gold band

earrings, Sequoyah had killed his first enemy,

1 One who upsets horse.

a Lumbee Indian, squatting in the tall canes along the Sumac River early one

morning the previous summer. The Lumbee, waiting to capture a Cherokee woman

from the village when she came for the clear running river water, and sell her

to the white slave buyers on the Amegwa (Big Water); Sequoyah shot him with bow

and arrow in the butt, just above the Indian's anus. After removing his scalp, a

group of gadugi2 buried the Indian.

Sequoyah listened attentively to each of the council speakers. This was part of

his training and apprenticeship into the Seven Clan Scribe Society. It was an

important society, and it stood apart from others in a particular way. This

difference - this superiority had come about a long. time ago. Before the white

man came, there had been received into the population of Sogwiligigageihi a

small group of immigrant Indians from the Southwest. The immigrants were a

wretched people, and they had experienced great suffering. Their lands were the

plateau country of the Great Plains. For many years thieves and hunters had

taken a toll of their people. At last they had given themselves up in despair -

their spirit broken. But it was not a human enemy that had overpowered them. It

was famine. No rain fell. Crops failed, and game left their lands. Less than

twenty-five survivors remained of this tribe. It is said the Great Sun told them

of their distant relatives in the Great Mountains to the East. They walked

there. It took more than a year to reach the mountain valley of

Sogwiligigageihiyi. It is said that the great, great, great grandfather of

Sequoyah's mother went out with a delegation to welcome and escort the Taliwas

into their village. The ragged group brought with them little more than the

clothes on their backs, but even in this moment of deep hurt and humiliation

they brought, of themselves as a people, one great gift - the thin gold plates

of their written language. Now, after the intervening years and generations, the

ancient blood of this tribe still ran in the veins of men of the Seven Clan

Scribe Society.

Scribes recorded the cultural and historical events of the tribe, and

participated in all council meetings, national as well as local.

2 A group of volunteer unpaid workers.

They took part in recording feats of bravery, death and action on the border and

battleground warfare. Not only was it a requirement to have a keen learning and

memory power, but also they were trained warriors, with stamina and daring

courage.

After the council adjourned, Sequoyah and the six boy scribes would write the

words of the Ancient Ones. Writing on corn shuck pressed paper, they remembered

the exact words spoken by each of the speakers in his or her dialect of the

Cherokee language.

Sequoyah's writing and that of the other six boys was carefully read by

experienced and elder scribes, to determine whether the boys had good memories,

and had written accuratcly all that was said by each of the council speakers.

That windcold evening in October 1779, Sequoyah listened to the speech of Young

Warrior, who reminded the people that he knew the weakness of the one the whites

called Attakulla-kulla, one not of the people's choosing - one who whispered to

the enemy, and pointed his finger in the direction of those villages whose

chiefs fought and defended their homes, women, children and lands; who refused

to become allies and follow forced orders of any white nation. These were the

villages that disappeared in the smoke of the white man's fire.

Young Warrior told them that he was aware of Attakullakulla's spies-the Lumbees,

Slave Catchers, who stole Cherokee women and children for the white slave place

on the Big Waters. Young Warrior ended his talk by saying: "Chief Tsalagidihi

has no clanspeople. He is weak. Only fools follow a weak leader who works for

the enemy. I have not forgotten my brother, killed by his hands. I think this:

We should be guided in the tracks of our great leader among us - him there,

Tsiyogunsi."

When the Red War Chief of the nation's fighting faction spoke, the Council House

was quiet. All one could hear was the rhythmical breathing of the people. He

said:

Beloved brothers and sisters, in times like these I say this that I am thinking:

No more will our people run, like the black fox to the mountains and caves to

hide. No more will we listen to the weak ones

that drink the whites' sweet water, go mad like the wild dogs in the mountains.

Give our women, our children, our lands to the whites. No! We fight. The

Northern Indians say they help; the Southern Indians say they help. We

Anitsalagi unite with them, use our strength; build brown wall to the east of

the Big Mountains, hold back whites. I say this: We break the Weak One, like the

bad bird egg that is pushed from the nest, he must go....

In February 1780, fourteen-year-old Sequoyah watched and listened as his father,

Sogwiligigagei wrote the names of the forty warriors who were carefully selected

by Dragging Canoe to destroy the fort of Attakullakulla, located on an island in

the Little Tennessee River.

Led by Young Warrior and his assistants Bench, Doublehead, and Black Fox, he

watched as they marched off in small groups across the zig-zag mountain path

toward Attakullakulla's stronghold. Finding the fort deserted, it was an easy

matter to burn it down - after first helping themselves to the white trader's

stock of goods.

Scouting the area of the island, the warriors found the Cherokee Killer with all

his family, guards, slaves, and many other white people hiding in the woods. The

warriors fought the white man's friendly Cherokees all night. When daylight

came, Young Warrior had lost nine good warriors, and five were wounded. But

Attakullakulla and most of his family, slaves and many of the whites were dead.

A few fled into the icy waters of the Little Tennessee and escaped.

Among Sequoyah's documents is the South Carolina Gazette, with a small article

on Attakullakulla's death. It appeared on July 3, 1780:

... An Account is juft now received, that the Little Carpenter (Attakullakulla)

and his Women and Children have been lately killed, and scalped in their own

Country by their own people; and that two very large Gangs of Cherokees, one of

them being Otter Tale (Dragging Canoe), the Other Young Warrior, are fet out for

the Frontiers of North Carolina while the others pretend to treat of Peace with

us....

Although the Cherokee fighting faction knew that reprisals on the white's spy,

Attakullakulla would be forthcoming, the Cherokee push and war was on all along

the borders of their nation. War with the whites became strong and bloody.

Chief Young Warrior and his warriors were constantly away from their village,

with Dragging Canoe's forces on the borders of Tennessee and North Carolina,

fighting the white enemy.

Then in the early daylight hours in the late spring of 1780, the colonial army

came to Sogwiligigagei village.

Silently they came, in canoes, through the heavy fog that hung over the valley

and Sumac River. Like cats stalking through the tall grass, the foot soldiers

slipped through the tall canes along the river upon the sleeping village of old

men, women and children, and sick persons.

Sequoyah, a boy of fourteen, and Uhyalug, were night guarding the only trail

leading into the settlement from the mountain above. At the same time, they were

keeping watch on the village milk cows and horses night grazing on the side of

the mountain below them. The boys looked down through the haze and caught a

glimpse of the soldiers creeping toward the village. Sequoyah wondered why the

pack of tame wolves and dogs failed to charge the enemy, and awaken the people.

He could not then know that Choctaw scouts had slipped in during the night, and

laid poison meat along the river for the animals, all were dead.

Sequoyah and Uhyalug gave the distressed turkey cry to the sleeping people, and

began shooting at the soldiers. Uhyalug ran to the top of the mountain to beat

the drum that had been hidden away in the cave for the purpose of signaling for

help from neighbor villages over the mountains. 8

When the first shot was fired, the people came out of ?heir homes - old men and

women, shooting and clubbing with guns, knives and hatchets. The younger women

ran with the children toward the river and the fleet of canoes, only to be met

by the

8 Drums were not used by Woodland rndians for signals, since the sound could not

carry any distance because of heavy woods and mountains. In this one Cherokee

village, the drum was used. From the top of the Mountain to the valley below, a

distance of 4½ miles, the drum was very effective.

blast of guns from the soldiers who were left guarding their escape route.

Sequoyah saw his sick father and tiny mother shot down in Ifront of their home,

as they came out firing at the soldiers. He saw his three elder sisters running

toward the river and the woods, and tall canes along the river, where all young

women and chil-dren were attempting to escape to their canoes. He crept closer

to the village, and was joined by Uhyalug, who informed him that horse soldiers

were coming over the mountain trail to the village.

The boys kept firing at the soldiers until their ball and powder ran out. All

they could do then was to watch from a tall bushy pine tree, where they were

forced to retreat and wait for help to come from other villages.

But the help they wished and waited for never came. Soldiers were also

destroying the other mountain villages nearby.

Sequoyah looked down in pain, anger and distress upon the one-way slaughter of

his people, unable to help them. The peopie were fighting with all their Indian

skill and strength against the guns and swords of the white and black soldiers.

Smoke rose in the village from the hundreds of guns firing. Sequoyah could see

and hear the thrust of steel swords into Indian bodies. There was yelling,

yelling, yelling of the soldiers, and the screaming of Indian children who

managed to escape the gun blas?. Mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, brothers

and sisters lay about like rocks.

Hundreds of mounted soldiers arrived over the mountain trail to help in the

Cherokee slaughter. Having killed all the old men and women fighters, having

shot those who were wounded, to make sure they died, the soldiers began rounding

up and dragging the women and children out of the tall canes and woods along

Sumac River. These were marched back to the scene of the battle. Women and

children who were injured were shot. Sequoyah's eldest sister Guyutse, wounded

in the legs, was killed alongside the Sumac River.

Mounted soldiers, in groups, rode wildly through the planted fields of young

corn, cotton, beans, peas and potatoes; swinging their swords, slashing and

destroying with the trampling feet

of their horses. All Cherokee horses and cattle within the valley were shot.

Then the soldiers plundered the smokehouse of hams and other dried meats. They

took all fruits and vegetaNes that were easy to load on horses or in canoes. The

communal corn cribs and Cherokee homes were set afire.

While the women and children watched their homes burn, all around them they saw

their dead, and the few soldiers hlled lying in their blood. White and black

soldiers began their work of collecting Cherokee scalps and privates, throwing

them into Cherokee made baskets, and putting some of the women's breasts in

their pockets.

Cherokee children screamed, and the women sang their magic protection

idigawesdi, 4 for they knew they would be killed - or worse, taken into slavery.

In less than four hours from the start of the massacre, every Cherokee man and

woman fighter was killed, fields and homes destroyed, and the horses and canoes

of the murdering soldiers were packed with cured meats, fruits and vegetables.

Soldiers ordered some of the women and children to the Cherokee canoes on the

Sumac River, where they were taken into slavery. Home soldiers led the way,

others behind and on each side of the remaining women and children, marched them

out of the valley, over the mountain trail, using them for a shield and

protection to reach the white settlement in South Carolina.

After the soldiers marched out of Sogwiligigagei valley, Sequoyah and Uhyalug

descended to the ground, and ran to their burning village to see if some of

those shot were still alive. What greeted their eyes was one of butchery -

Cherokees with their heads cut off, scalped heads, private parts cut off, and

their bodies slashed open. Others had been thrown into burning homes.

Finding none of their people alive, the boys ran, following the horse soldiers,

and giving the eagle distress call for help to those who might hear in the other

villages. Help never came.

4 "To say them, one," the plural of igawesdi. A magical incantation which a

Cherokee can merely think, sing, or say. The power in the magical charm is in

the thoughts of the one who says the text, directed toward the recipient.

The boys followed the horse soldiers and their people to the white settlement in

South Carolina. In no way could they get close enough to the women and children

to help them escape. They had only rocks in their hands for weapons.

Sequoyah and Uhyalug returned to their nation, and walked through the mountains

to Dragging Canoe's newly built village on Crawfish Creek, a tributary of the

Big Tennessee River, near what is today Chattanooga.

Groups of volunteer workers from Dragging Canoe's village went to the valley of

Sogwiligigagei, and buried the dead. The village was never rebuilt.

Chief Young Warrior and his force of sixty-nine warriors, including Whitepath, a

shaman and the halfblood brother of Sequoyah, and the two boys, remained in the

village of Dragging Canoe. He was their great war chief and brother.

Three

WARRIOR REVENGE, AND A NEW NAME

To THE CHEROKEES throughout the nation, the news of the attack on the powerful

and beloved village of Sogwiligigagei, and the other eight villages in the Big

Mountains, raised the war whoop and the blood-red war hatchet. Never had the

fighting Cherokees been whipped like this - a whole village wiped out at the

hands of the enemy, almost one hundred left dead on the ground, their women and

children carried off into slavery by the white enemy.

Sequoyah strained for revenge on the whites. His one desire and objective was to

kill as many Anglos to pay for the deaths of his mother and father, and his

other relatives, and to capture whites for Cherokee slavery whenever and

wherever he could find them in his nation. He knew that fighting the enemy was

not done haphazardly. Training and experience had to be gained first, and

learned under the wisdom and guidance of a great war leader.

Nowhere in the Cherokee Nation could he have "walked in the tracks" of a greater

war leader than Dragging Canoe.

Dragging Canoe was trained from birth for his position as war chief of the

nation. Nineteen years before, his father Gvlihudhanisi, chief of Tellico (Tahli

or Taliwa), located on the Long Island of the Holston (Cherokee) River, was one

of the twentyfour village chiefs who were murdered by the soldiers at Fort

Prince Ceorge under a pretense "peace treaty" between Governor Lyttelton and

Attakullakulla.

Dragging Canoe was shrewd and skilled. In his youth he had become a master of

the English, French and Spanish languages. [Je had been taught by several

different white educated Indian teachers in the Northeast, as well as southern

Indian Spanish teachers. All were able men.

Sequoyah lived in Dragging Canoe's village. He and Uhyalug became his adopred

sons after the massacre of their people. But the free times away from the whites

were over for the mountain boys. Dragging Canoe's new village was only a

distance of nine miles from the Great Island1 in the Tennessee River, formerly

Attakullakulla's "peace town Fort, where colonist Indian commissioners and

traders had set up their trading place and whiskey still. Every Anglo spy,

murderer, thief, whore, robber and runaway army deserter and bound slaves, both

white and black, congregated in this "White Roost," and others like it in the

Cherokee friendlies' villages throughout the vast nation.

During the hot summer of 1780, while Dragging Canoes forces fought on the

borders of their nation, volunteer groups of workers had built six additional

new warrior villages near his village on Crawfish Creek. This chain of villages

was for the purpose of controlling the white invasion that used the main water

route through the nation - the Tennessee River, and the confederation with the

Creeks and Chickasaws. The viUages were Fighting village on Ocee (White) River,

just over the Tennessee line, today Walker County, Georgia; Red Clay on Red Clay

I,Creek, below today Chattanooga in Dade County, Georgia; Lookout on the east

side of Lookout Creek near Lookout Mountain; Chestua (Tsistu) on Rabbit Creek, a

tributary of the Tennessee River near Cleveland; Running Water near the present

Hale's Bar Lock and Dam; and Crow village on Crow Creek near the present

Stevenson, Alabama. After these villages were built, they were filled to

capacity with a village chief, trained warriors and their famflies of the

Cherokee Nation's fighting faction, and confederacy with the

1 Great Island has been confused in literature as Long Island, or one of

Dragging Canoe's seven (not five) Chickamauga (Crayfish) towns. It was given by

Attakullakulla to his white friends.

northern, southern, and southwestern Indians who were striving to hold their

lands from the white ones who called themselves Americans.

In the late summer of 1780, Sequoyah went with Dragging Canoe and a delegation

of assistant village chiefs and warriors to the Cherokee settlement on the Ohio

River that was united with the Shawnees,' and other tribes of northern Indians.

The Cherokees attended a council of the Shawnees, their socalled enemies, and

listened to the speakers in which Dragging Canoe and Sequoyah wrote in two of

the six different Cherokee dialects the Shawnee talk:

... Beloved brothers we are glad to see our southern neighbors among us All that

is passing among us, you are to know. We have our war hatchets, our guns, they

shall not be buried until all whites go beyond the sea. The Long Knives will be

soon coming to your country. We will help you. Our warriors, our guns, they

shall help you drive them out. We ask our southern brothers to go visit all our

brothers, and take this straight and strong talk. .

The Cherokees took the talk of their northern brothers to the Isouth - to the

Creek and Chickasaw fighting confederacy; and to other tribes in the southwest

who were struggling for their homelands, and had not become household pets of

the white man and his sweetened water, words and presents. They opened their

fortified villages and hospitality to the fighting Shawnees, Miami, Creeks and

Chickasaws, and everywhere in the nation the whites pushed for the prized

Cherokee lands they became a battleground of Indian and white slaughter.

The friendly agency chiefs, seeing the confederated fighting movement in the

nation, came to Dragging Canoe's village, bringing along their white advisors to

talk peace and friendship with the white ones. These Uncle Tomahawks who had

found security in the white establishment were unable to move unless a white man

was tagging along with them. Tassel (Old Tassel), who replaced Attakullakulla as

peace chief of the friendly faction of the nation, and his chosen war Ichief,

Hanging Maw (Hanging Paw) were educated, advised, and bribed by the colonist

Indian agents.

To Dragging Canoe, his assistants, and warriors, these two good Cherokees told

of the changing times that had come to their nation since the white's

Revolutionary War. And the good ones thought, now that the white Americans had

beaten the Fnglish king's armies, that Indians should live in peace beside their

white neighbors. Tassel said: "It is of no use to fight so many. They are as the

stars above, count them! We keep the peace....

But Dragging Canoe replied: "You say you keep the peace with the whites. Not

fight. How you keep our lands? How you protect our women and children whites

take for slaves to use? No! You give to whites, enemies of our people. I listen

no more to evil weak ones. Go to your side of upper mountains, live with whites.

We fighters take care of ourselves, our people. ..

Sequoyah, uneasy and troubled, sat in the firelit Council House listening to and

writing of the talks of the leaders of the split nation.

Indeed, the pampered friendlies and the fighting Cherokees were constantly at

one another's throats through the agitation of the whites. The friendlies sat

around the traders' stockade village; drinking the white man's whiskey and

receiving his bribes for helping the colonist armies whip and destroy their own

fighting people. These "good Indians" in every tribe in Indian America killed

their own clansmen and tribesmen. The trained scourge and Uncle Tomahawks of the

white man, who when com-manded to squat, these good tools squatted. They had

become so obligated to the Anglos that they were unable to see or to learn that

the whites made no difference between their friendly "pup-pets" and the

hostiles, when it came time to rid the country of the Cherokees. The friendlies

were shot and killed the same as their fighting brothers as quickly as their

useful purpose had been fulfilled.

By the time Sequoyah was seventeen he was a trained and skilled warrior, and had

mastered the duties of scribe under the guidance of Dragging Canoe.

In the white settlement between the rivers called by the whites Clinch and

Powell, Sequoyah, war painted, and having said a

battle charm for power and protection, raided the new white settlement on

Cherokee burned-out village lands early one morning in May 1783. Led by Crane,

one of Dragging Canoe's assist-ant war leaders, the small party of eighteen

warriors surprised the whites when they came out of their homes to get water at

the spring and to tend their livestock. The warriors opened fire upon them,

killing eight% while others fled in many directions to hide in the woods and

along the creek. Capturing a man by the name of Fitzgerald, the warriors set the

homes afire, and Sequoyah tying Fitzgerald's hands and legs together with

mulberry rope, ripped off his scalp of long red curls. Then he pushed him into

the flames of a burning log house.

They returned to Dragging Canoe's village the horses and cattle which had been

stolen by the whites in that settlement. These Cherokee horses and crossbred

buffalo and wild Spanish cattle were branded with a small notch-like V taken

from the tip of the right ear.

During the bloody wars of the middle and late 1780's, in which the white

settlers' stride for Cherokee lands was in full swing, and the Cherokee faction

and confederacy were fighting a die-hard stand against them and the bribed

chiefs, Sequoyah, his brother Whitepath, and a group of eight warriors ran a

flatboat line on the Tennessee River. Using the boats, they traded gold to the

Spanish in Florida and Louisiana Territory for arms and ammunition.

In Florida, Sequoyah and Whitepath were invited to attend a council of the

governor, Don Estevon Miro. The governor's officers escorted the Cherokees to

the governor's brick walled palace courtyard, where palm covered sheds were set

up, and low split log tables were loaded with the food offered by their host,

and served by cheek-branded Florida Indian vassals.

The Indians feasted on venison, turkey, melons, fruits and breads of a great

variety. Wines and liquors were offered, and some of the Cherokees drank it.

Sequoyah and Whitepath said they preferred the black drink. 2

2 Chocolate and coffee made with coconut milk. A Florida Indian drink which the

Spanish people adopted.

There were many Southern Indian leaders and warriors from other tribes attending

the council. The Spanish governor made a small but imposing speech to his Indian

guests:

I wish to welcome our red brothers to my lands and my home. Here you see we live

in peaceful surroundings. Our red brothers are not 'I without friends. The

Americans have no chief, no king. They are men that are lost and wander in the

woods like the wild ox. They are but It's nothing unto themselves. They will

soon be settling in your country. Your people will become their slaves. Consider

well my talk7 for the Spanish people are your friends. We do not set down in

your country. We do not wish it. We will assist you, and jou shall want for

nothing.

Take up your guns and fight them. Give them no rest until they are subdued, and

driven beyond the waters of the mighty ocean. Our boats will come up the

Tennessee with guns and ammunition. You shall be well supplied. Unite and show

them your strength. 3

The Cherokees could look around themselves, and see just how free Florida

Indians were under their Spanish conquerors. Florida Indians, who managed to

escape extermination by the Spanish, were branded on the cheek, forehead or the

arm with the Spanish owner's initial. The French and English followed suit in

branding their Indian slaves. The only difference with the Spanish was that the

people stayed out of Cherokee lands.

The Spanish wanted the Cherokee gold trade, and the only way they could get that

gold was by offering fair exchange trade goods, supplied by their Indian trader

vassals under orders and command of Spanish officers.

Springfrog, an assistant chief in Dragging Canoe's fighting Iforces, with a

group of warriors and their families, lived at the Spanish lead mines - Mine de

Mota in what is today Missouri -where powder and lead were shipped up the

Mississippi to the Ohio River, thence down the Tennessee to the Cherokee War

Chief, Dragging Canoe and his fighting warriors.

With the supply of arms from the Spanish, the Cherokee warriors' drive to hold

back white invasion from their nation pene-trated every path, every river and

creek in Tennessee, North

3 George Guess documents, 1786. The speech of Governor Miro was written

in Spanish by Sequoyah. Translated by the author (verbatim et literatim).

Carolina and parts of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia and the whole

of what is now Kentucky.

Attakullakulla, the former peace-appointed chief, and his war chief, Oganasdoda

of the friendly faction, had, in 1775, given Kentucky away - the hunting lands

of the Cherokees - to Richard Henderson and Nathaniel Hart in exchange for

trading goods. But the Cherokees still fought for it.

Dragging Canoe was the recognized war chief of the Cherokee people and the split

nation, and was backed by the majority, although the appointed chiefs and

pampered pets of the Colonial Government and its agents were led to believe

otherwise.

In the late spring of 1786, while scouting on the Saluda River in South

Carolina, Sequoyah and Uhyalug came upon two white men in the tall canes along

the river who had butchered three head of Cherokee cattle and were skinning and

cutting up the meat. One man was killed. The other, wounded, jumped into the

river to escape, but was captured by Sequoyah, who tied his hands together with

sinew, and took him and the Cherokee horse that he had stolen back to Dragging

Canoe's village.

After much prodding with the sharpened end of a green cane jabbed into the white

man's groin, the sullen man told Sequoyah that his name was George Guess, and

that he and his dead partner were new settlers from a white settlement in South

Carolina.

The Beloved Woman Oh, mother of Dragging Canoe, pondered over what method to use

to dispose of their unwanted guest. Dragging Canoe, who had been wounded a few

days before with a musket ball in the leg, sat on the clay floor of his home

with his back propped against a bale of bearskins. He told Sequoyah: "My young

son, you say you need another name -other than what you have to use with the

unegvs (whites). Now, that white man there, he have name of George Guess. He

need it no longer. You take his name. That horse he stole. George is name of

white Uguwiyuhi over there across the Amegwa. 4 Guess is anybody. We know that

from that dictionary book. That white man our guess now.

4 Big Water.

It is recorded that Sequoyah took Dragging Canoe's suggestion and accepted

George Guess for his formal name - a name spelled in the Cherokee syllabary as

Tsatsi Tvsis.

There was a victory dance and feast on the night that Sequoyah acquired his new

name. Whitepath sang out his brother's new name for all in the village to hear,

waving the red stick and eagle feathers 'that symbolized power. Sequoyah carried

the painted red stick, eagle feathers dangling with the scalp of George Guess,

dancing, dancing, dancing the Victory Dance. He felt peace within his soul in

the revenge of the deaths of his mother, father, and sister. He sang out, for

all to hear, the feats that he had accomplished during the year.

Sequoyah's new name spread from village to village. Conditions worsened in the

nation because of the settlement of whites on Cherokee lands, and by the

colonist government's fraudulent land ceding treaties made with the unauthorized

appointed chiefs, living at the Indian agency's stockade village. There they

were kept drunk on traders' whiskey and were obligated to the whites for

protection from fighting clansmen. Against this despair and defeat, the daring

feats which Sequoyah seemed driven to achieve, spread his fame far and wide over

the nation, to the Ohio, and to the Mississippi Rivers.

Battle after bloody battle was fought with the squatting white settlers and the

colonist armies. Sequoyah, the warrior-scribe, recorded the work and deeds of

his fighting people and those of himself in the small black leather£overed

ledger books bought from Spanish traders.

As his count of "white hair" grew, so did his name at village dances and feasts.

The shy young girls would whisper among themselves: "There is the one that

writes. The brave warrior Tsatsi Tvsis that follows in the footsteps of our

great war chief, Dragging Canoe. He is to be watched, he will bring much good

power to our people. He is a good catch."

During the summer of 1788, when Dragging Canoe and his fighting warriors were on

the borders of the nation in what is today Kentucky, three Choctaws came to

Crawfish Place. Finding only old men and women warriors and a few black

prisoners

guarding the homes, the Choctaws told Dragging Canoe's first wife that she and

her daughter, a child of six, were wanted by Dragging Canoe on White Ridge to

help in his camp. Of course, it was a ruse. The Choctaws captured Eni, and her

child Ewi.

Months later, Dragging Canoe learned that his wife and child had been sold to

the whites in Virginia. Through messengers, the whites began to negotiate for

the exchange of prisoners. By the end of 1789, Dragging Canoe had exchanged

three black and two white prisoners for his wife Eni.

But the whites demanded all white prisoners in the Cherokee Nation in exchange

for his daughter Ewi. Therefore, the parley dragged on. Dragging Canoe had no

assurance whatsoever that his daughter was safe, other than the white Indian

agent's written message, sent through bribed friendly Cherokees.

Knowing that the whites had no more regard for the life of an Indian child than

that of a wild goat, Dragging Canoe waited until he and his scouts could go into

the white settlement, where Ewi was being held.

It was a three-day journey by foot from Dragging Canoe's village on Crawfish

Creek in Tennessee, to the white settlement of Hillsville in the mountains of

Virginia, where Ewi was being kept in the home of a white man by the name of

Hill. Dragging Canoe, with assistant chief Crane, Sequoyah, and four scouts,

left his village on the night of June 16, 1790. Walking through the mountain

paths into Virginia, they arrived on the third day at Hill's settlement. It was

evening, and the settlers were out milking their cows, and cutting wood for

their fires.

Knowing that their own lives were in constant danger on lands the whites - lands

which once belonged to the Cherokee Tribe, they took no chances coming in

contact with them. Crawling on their bellies through thickets and tall grass

until within viewing distance of the white man Hill's home (Hill's house had

been fully described to Dragging Canoe by an Indian informer, they lay and

watched for signs that his small daughter was still there. M eanwhile, Sequoyah

and Black Fox crawled within a few yards of the spring which served the

settlement. Watching from

their places of concealment, they saw a few white children running and playing

with dogs, rolling wooden hoops, and carrying wood into the houses. Men and

women were milking cows, and feeding chickens, geese and horses in the log

corral.

Nowhere was there any evidence of the Cherokee child Ewi. Just at dusky dark, a

woman came to the spring for water, and to place wooden 'pails of milk in the

cold spring. Silently, Sequoyah came behind her as she bent down into the water.

Covering her mouth with one hand, while he held her arms behind her with the

other, he took her to Dragging Canoe so that he might question her about his

daughter.

Shaking like a rabbit caught between the paws of a cat, the white woman told

Dragging Canoe that there was no Indian child in the settlement; that she was

there many weeks ago, but became sickly, and Mr. Hill gave her to a traveling

preacher who came to preach in their settlement once a month. The preacher's

name was John Craig, who lived in the town of Petersville, across the mountains,

about two days' walk. She did not know exactly where Mr. Craig lived in the

town.

Dragging Canoe knew that it would be a fruitless search to continue on to

another white settlement in Virginia. So he and his warriors returned to their

village with the white woman pris-oner. The woman, Daisy Spinks, was given to an

aged Cherokee family who had lost their sons and two daughters in the wars with

the whites. She was forced to work in the fields, as well as around the house,

chopping wood, carrying water, and cutting up the meat brought to all aged

Indians unable to work.

White people taken prisoners by the Cherokees were treated well in most cases,

and made to work in the fields and help in the Indian homes. Prisoners were

taken for the same purpose as that with which the whites took Indians - they

were a valuable means of exchange and slave labor. The women were not raped like

the Indian slaves of white owners. Neither were the white females and males

beaten, unless they tried to escape, refused to work, or played trickery with

Cherokee owners.

Four

MARRIAGE AND THE PEACE TREATY

ALTHOUGH wars between the Anglos and Cherokees were fought in their nation and

on its borders, Cherokee tribal traditions and customs continued on throughout

their country.

Sequoyah was twenty-three, tall, lean and girl-shy when he found Tsini, the

eldest daughter of Tsatsi Ughvi, while attending one of the Friendship Dances in

the mountain village of her father.

His love affair was one-sided - at first, Tsini seemed not to be interested in

him, nor even to notice him. So he asked Whitepath, a Didahnvwisgi 1, for a

magic charm which he could use to think, say, and do to attract her to him - to

see that he was a handsome and strong man, and would be a good provider.

One of the magic texts that Sequoyah perhaps used goes like this:

Now! Listen! Now, Red Raven.

I am dressed as well as the Redtail Hawk.

I am as handsome as the Redbird.

I am as beautiful as the Hummingbird.

As the Redtail Hawk is masculine, I am masculine.

1 A didahnvwisgi, "curer of them," he or she, is both physician and priest. A

shaman. There was the dasgidigi, commonly referred to as the Medicine Man who

conducted ceremonies for the prevention of, as well as the treatment of,

disease. The didahnesegi ("putter-in and drawer out of them, he") was a

sorcerer, a witch, who used his knowledge for evil purposes, and therefore never

positively identifiable.

As the Red bird can do much, I can do as much.

As the Blue Dove can say much, I can say as

much: Gule! Gule! Gule! 2

The magic charm seemed to have cast its love-spell upon Tsini. Sequoyah asked

his foster mother Eni and the Beloved Woman Oh to take the sacred white deerskin

from the deer he had killed the previous winter to Tsini, and to tell her that

he wished her Ito "follow behind him."

When the women returned from Tsatsi Ughvi's village on the Iseventh day, they

brought Sequoyah the sacred ear of colored corn and a white and red horsehair

belt, woven with tiny cut white clamshells Tsini had made for him to tie around

his hunting shirt for all to see that "he was taken."

So it was settled. Tsini became Sequoyah's wife in December, 1789.

Unlike most Cherokee men when they marry in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, it was customary for the young couple to live in the same village

with the wife's clanspeople -not in the same house, but near by in a home of

their own. Most often, their home was built by a group of "free labor" workers

from the wife's clanspeople and furnished with items made by the group, and

other clansmen.

Usually women relatives of the bride gave freely of their time and talents.

Handmade household items such as quilts, blankets, clay pots, bowls, painted

skins, cane and bark mats, and baskets made from the honeysuckle vine, the oak,

pine and mulberry trees were some of the useful gifts bestowed on the new wife.

Sequoyah's duties as scribe and warrior in Dragging Canoe's fighting forces

required him to be closer to his "works." So a group of his clansmen composed a

free labor force, and built for him and Tsini, a tw~room log house on Crow Creek

near what Iis today Stevenson, Alabama, where his brother Whitepath lived with

his wife, whom he had married two years previously. Also

2 "Attraction" idigawesdi may be said or sung, used in "going to the water"

ritual where the entire Cherokee nation is unified and spiritually reassured in

face of some force which threatens its life, and also utilized in "remaking"

tobacco.

living in this Cherokee settlement, which became known to the whites as "Crow

Town," was Young Warrior and his wife and six children.

Sequoyah's father-in-law Tsatsi Ughvi was a weAthy Cherokee village chief.

Back between two lofty mountains in North Carolina, where his forefathers had

discovered gold more than six hundred years before, he and others of his clan,

and his wife's clan had buflt their settlement along White Fires River. It was a

valley that ran for miles before it was stopped short by another towering

mountain. From his mountain valley stronghold, Tsatsi Ughvi fought back white

invasion, and the Anglos' lust for his gold and rich farm lands, by posting

armed guards along the three entrances to the valley and with crossbred wolf-

dogs - a unique and vicious animal.

When Tsatsi Ughvi's daughter married Sequoyah, he and his wife spared no expense

in setting them up in housekeeping. Supplying the young couple with fine horses,

cattle and hogs which Tsatsi Ughvi bought from the Spanish in Florida and the

Louisiana Territory with gold that he and his clansmen mined in his valley. His

viflage was just one of the many that supplied Dragging Canoe's fighting forces

with farm products, and gold for guns and ammunition.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when the Cherokees were being

pushed on all sides by the Anglos, and the new United States' armies were

striking devastation to Cherokee viflages for the final crushing blow to bring

them to their knees, about the only crops that co&d be grown successfully was

the main staple, and their staff of life - corn.

Corn had to be grown by the older men, women and young boys and girls, some

white and black slave prisoners. These prisoners were distributed among the

various villages where the need was greatest for field-work.

The Cherokees in Tsatsi Ughvi's village supplied many of the other vfllages

throughout the nation with their three hundred acres of corn. The corn was

plowed with a type of oxen similar to those of the white man, and which had been

used for centuries.

The wooden plow was copied after that of the Indians who lived to the southwest

beyond the Big Waters.

As soon as the corn was mature and dry, it was shelled and stored underground in

caves to prevent confiscation or destruction by the white armies, and the

settlers who stole and plundered Cherokee villages like hungry wild dogs

smelling out another's food supply. An even greater sport and dirty game was to

steal the Indians' horses, cattle, hogs and sheep. If there were too many of

these animals to drive across the nation's boundary lines to the stockade forts,

and the white settlements, Cherokee horses, cattle, sheep, hogs and tame fowl

were killed and left to rot anywhere that herds were found and unguarded.

Seven hundred Cherokee warriors and their families were settled on the Ohio

(Uwagi) River near what is today the Kentucky and West Virginia line, fighting

with their brothers and allies, the Shawnees.

Sequoyah, with his wife Tsini, and a group of scouts and warriors carried

messages and supplies of arms, ammunition, and shelled corn up the Tennessee

River to where the Ohio drains into the Amaegwa (Mississippi). And when squatter

white settlements sprang up along the Tennessee River on Cherokee lands, and

evil and foul-talking whites prevented Indians from using the river by firing

upon them, the Cherokee fighting forces and their allies burned their

settlements, captured and killed the squatters.

These strange wild people - prisoner debtors, murderers, and runaway renegades

from the poor-houses of Europe, spewed out over Indian lands, killing and being

killed. It seemed not to matter to them, for they were determined to become the

master of Indian America like the kings and lords they had left behind. They saw

the chance to take, to grab and to steal possessions of the Indians which they

had never owned in the country from which they came. In this white sickness, the

Great Spirit chose the American Indian Tribes to be the goat.

So the tiresome Cherokee-white wars continued by that faction of Cherokee

confederacy headed by the war chief, Dragging

Canoe, and the forty-one of the sixty-two villages throughout the whole nation

that followed his leadership and guidance.

Early one morning in the fall of 1790, Tsinj came walking slowly from the Osi,

carrying her son wrapped in white goatskin. The young parents called him Tvsisdi

(Young Guess). On the fourth day of the child's life, the young parents took

their baby to the running stream of Crow Creek for baptism. The priest and

physician faced the rising Sun and held the child over the water, while saying a

prayer for his good life in his future; offering him seven times to the water

without yet touching it. Then Tsini dipped her fingers into the water and gently

placed it at her son's head and body. Others of the village immersed themselves

seven times in the running waters, while the priest said prayers for each one.

In the following year of 1791, Sequoyah took another wife -a Shawnee whom he

found wandering and dazed from the bru-tal rape and beatings at the hands of

three white men. She was called Tsisdunigisdi (Wild Rose).

Another log room was built on to the house which he, Tsini and their baby

occupied on Crow Creek across the Tennessee River in Alabama.

When the newly elected Great White Father, George Washington, ordered William

Blount, the governor over the territory of the United States south of the River

Ohio, and superinten-dent of Indian Affairs for the southern district, to

assemble the Cherokee chiefs and headmen together at White's Port on the Holston

River to make another peace treaty with the friendly appointed chiefs, Dragging

Canoe decided for once that he and his assistant chiefs and warriors would

attend the "peace meeting." They wanted to see for themselves if the whites

really wanted to stop the war on the Indians, or if the assemblage was for the

purpose of gaining another foothold on Cherokee lands. 8 Also, to see what the

results of attending the whites' meeting would have on the bribed and guarded

chiefs of the twentynine villages in the nation.

3 See Cherokee Nation Treaties Between the United States of America and the

Cherokee Nation from 1785, pp.89-94.

Dragging Canoe's assistants and warriors dressed in their finest clothes to meet

the white government agent of the new smafi nation on the first day of July,

1791.

Their fringed hunting shirts and drawstring pants were a mulitude of colors -

red, white, brown, yellow and turquoise painted buckskin, and homespun cotton

and wild flax cloth. A beaded belt made of dyed horsehair and buckskin was tied

on the left around their hunting shirts. Soft moccasins were painted and beaded,

and an assortment of Ahhunwogi (turbans) completed their dress. Over Dragging

Canoe's shoulders was draped his prized war mantle, worked with thousands of red

bird feathers, and upon his head, he wore his red headdress of bird feathers.

The Cherokee horses were decked out in handwoven red, white and brown striped

blankets, and red and white eagle feathers were tied upon their horsehair

bridles. The heads and nimps of the horses were painted in Cherokee symbols,

denoting their power. The saddles were made by the Cherokees, and some were

obtained from Spanish traders.

Sequoyah and three selected scouts led the procession through the mountain

paths, followed by the great war chief, Dragging Canoe, his assistants and

warriors. They traveled to the fort of Mr. White, where the French Broad River

empties into the Holston. (White's Fort is known today as Knoxville.)

Dragging Canoe and his people camped several miles away from the fort on the

night of July 1. About a mile away, Standing Turkey (Gvnagadoga), who had taken

the leadership of Hanging Maw (killed by the whites), his assistant Boot, and

their paid followers of two hundred and eighty-nine men and women, waited in

camp. They had gathered there two days previously.

The Cherokees were awakened at daylight by the ringing of the fort bell. While

Dragging Canoe and his assistants ate from their buckskin bag of ghvhwisidi,4

Sequoyah and six other scouts skirted the general area of the fort.

4 Parched corn pounded into meal. often mixed with crushed hickory nuts, which

Cherokees prepared for a journey.

Finding that the area was not patrolled by the whites, and guards were only

around the fort, Dragging Canoe and his people - who numbered over nine hundred

- rode on in and stopped on the open grounds along the two rivers below the

fort. He sent Whitepath, Bloody Fellow, Doublehead and Sequoyah to the guard at

the fort gate to inform the governor that he and his people - the recognized

chief of the Cherokee Nation, had come to hear his talk." And that they would

wait down by the river in the open grounds.

Not long after Dragging Canoe and his people arrived at the fort, Standing

Turkey, Boot, Rising Fawn (George Lowery), and their followers, rode up to the

fort, dismounted, and talked to the guards. They were decked out in the finery

of the white man, with scarlet velvet knee pants, ruffled white and lace shirts,

knee stockings, black brass buckled slippers and three-sided black hats with

white feathers on two

The friendlies remained outside in front of the fort gate. And in daring

boldness, Standing Turkey paraded himself back and forth before the gate

entrance, like a strutting turkey gobbler before his small flock of hens.

Dragging Canoe, knowing that this parade performance was done on his behalf,

angrily called out to Standing Turkey: "Be still. You will get to see your Great

White Brother. He not leave you.

Dragging Canoe's group retired to the shade of the sycamore trees, from the hot

July sun. There they waited, resting, and telling jokes about the whites.

Sequoyah and another scout by the name of Two Killer, curi-ous about the fort

and the people inside, walked past three out-side guards and peeped between the

stockade poles.

Inside all was a bustle. Soldiers were setting up the government's "presents" -

wagon loads of all kinds of goods, from bolts of bright colored cloth to huge

brass pots, fancy knives, horse bridles, saddles, mirrors, black hats, and the

like. These were being unloaded from the wagons, and displayed in piles on the

fort grounds so that the Cherokees could better examine the fine things the

Great White Father had sent to his "red" children to

be good, and not fight anymore with his white ones. Missing from the piles of

goods were guns and ammunition. These had been given to the friendlies in

previous years, to use against their own brothers.

Sequoyah saw white women working over large pots of food to feast the Great

White Fathers' red children.

About noon, the mixed-blood interpreters, John Thompson and James Carey, came

out of the fort with guards. They informed both groups of Cherokees, the

friendlies and the hostiles, that Governor Blount was ready for them to come

inside. They were told that no type of weapon would be allowed.

Chiefs from Dragging Canoe's group had previously placed handmade hunting knives

inside their shirts. Dragging Canoe's assistants were Bloody Fellow, Doublehead,

Young Warrior, Daksi, Whitepath and Sequoyah. They followed the two interpreters

and five guards inside.

Seated in the shade of a large oak was the white-haired Governor Blount. He had

the treaty papers spread out in front of him, on a table made of split logs.

Beside him were his aides. Some were standing; some sat. Split log tables, piled

high with food, were placed all around inside the fort grounds.

The mixed-blood, James Carey, introduced Governor Blount to the Cherokee chiefs.

The governor arose, bowed, and told the Cherokees: "Welcome my red brothers! My

Great Father ex-tends his hand in friendship to all his red children. I speak

for him. My Great Father wishes peace with his red children. His words are in

this paper that I hold in my hands. He wishes his red children to bury the Red

Hatchet forever, and the path be-tween his white children and his red children's

nation to be swept clean of all past wrongs. So that both his white and red

children may sleep in their homes undisturbed, and the hair on their heads shall

become white as the snow with the age of passingyears. . . 5"

5 The speech in part, given by Governor William Blount to the Cherokees is

translated by the author from the Cherokee syllabary writings of George Guess,

July 2, 1791.

The interpreters, John Thompson and James Carey, told the Cherokees to go

forward, bow, and shake hands in friendship with Governor Blount, the Great

White Father's assistant.

Most of the Cherokees did as they were told. They bowed from the waist to the

governor, and shook hands with him. Dragging Canoe, Bloody Fellow, Whitepath and

Sequoyah refused. They saw no reason to kowtow and shake hands in friendship

with a white man until the treaty papers with the Great White Father's words

upon it were read to them. To them, this was being pretending fools.

The purpose of Dragging Canoe and his assistant chiefs in coming to the meeting

was to hear, with their own ears, the treaty conditions set up by the new Great

White Father. And another thing which prompted Dragging Canoe, Whitepath, and

Sequoyah's attendance there on that hot July day in 1791, was the rumor that the

Great White Father's treaty with the Cherokees would stipulate the release of

thousands of Cherokee slave prisoners, held by the whites all over the eastern

states.

So it was in Article III of the Treaty of Holston that held out some faint hope

to Dragging Canoe that he might obtain the release of his small daughter. And to

Sequoyah and Whitepath it meant that their two sisters, slave prisoners of the

whites for many years, might be restored to them. Article III in the Treaty of

Holston reads:

The Cherokee Nation shall deliver to the governor of the Territory of the United

States 6f America, south of the River Ohio, on or before the first day of April

next at this place, all persons who are now prisoners, captured by them from any

part of the United States: And the United States shall on or before the same

day, and at the same place, restore to the Cherokees, all the prisoners now in

captivity, which the citizens of the United States have captured from them.

That day, after feasting the Cherokees, and supplying gourds of whiskey

processed at Mr. White's whiskey still, peace pipes were smoked. Most of the

whites and Cherokees were too drunk and sick to think about the peace treaty

papers.

Dragging Canoe, Whitepath and Sequoyah carried Bloody Fellow, Doublehead, Young

Warrior and Daksi out of the fort,

and dumped them into the river so that they might regain their senses and become

clean of spirit and mind again.

Next day, July 3, 1791, in the afternoon, after feasting the Cherokees again,

the treaty papers were read by the governor, and interpreted by mixed-bloods,

John Thompson and James Carey, to the two groups of the Cherokee faction.

Governor Blount informed his interpreters that the cession of Cherokee lands in

Tennessee and North Carolina should not be read to the red sons-of-bitches in

Article IV. "Read only that part of the Article IV where it says that certain

valuable goods and money is to be given to the bloody bastards," he told the

interpreters. Article IV reads as follows:

The boundary between the citizens of the United States and the Cherokee Nation,

is and shall he as follows: Beginning at the top of the Curahee mountain, where

the Creek line passes it - thence a direct line to Tugelo river-thence North

East to the Occunna moun-tains, and over the same along the South Carolina

Indian boundary to the North Carolina boundary - thence North to a point from

which a line is to be extended to the river Clinch, that shall pass the Holston

at the ridge which divides the waters running into Little river, from those

running into the Tennessee - Thence up the river Clinch to Campbell's line, and

along the same to the top of Cumber-land Mountain - thence a direct line to the

Cumberland River to a point from which a South-west line will strike the mouth

of Duck river.

And in order to preclude forever all disputes relative to the said boundary, the

same shall be ascertained, and marked plainly by three persons appointed on the

part of the United States, and three Cher~ kees on the part of their Nation.

And in order to extinguish forever all claims of the Cherokee Nation, or any

part thereof to any of the land lying to the right of the above described,

beginning as aforesaid at the Currahee mountain, it is hereby agreed, that in

addition to the consideration heretofore made for the said land, the United

States will cause certain valuable goods to be immediately delivered to the

undersigned Chiefs and Warriors, for the use of their Nation, and the said

United States will also cause the sum of one thousand dollars to be paid

annually to the said Cher~ kee Nation - And the undersigned Chiefs and Warriors,

do hereby

for themselves and the whole Cherokee Nation, their heirs and descendants, for

the considerations above mentioned, Release, Quit Claim, Relinquish and Cede,

all the land to the right 0£ the line de-scribed and beginning as aforesaid.

Article 14 in the Treaty of Hoiston was not read to the Cherokees. None of the

Indians were permitted to read the treaty papers before the signing - the

governor thought Dragging Canoe savage to ask for such a request.

The two factions of Cherokees retired to an area of the fort under trees to

discuss and argue the points of the Great White Father's peace treaty. Standing

Turkey said it was good to stop the bloody wars with the whites; that .the Great

White One loved his Indian children same as his white ones. "Did they not see

the wagonloads of good presents he send to them? And money was coming too."

"Now, you not see the white's money?" Dragging Canoe told him. "How you know

money come? Who wants money? You chief of white man. I, Tsiyogunsi, war chief of

our people. They love me, I not give my hands to whites for presents."

In the middle of these hot arguments of the chiefs, the two interpreters voiced

their opinion that should the chiefs fail to agree and not sign the "peace

treaty" of the Great White Father, Ithat his armies would come to their nation

and crush it with their big iron cannon - that many Cherokees, young and old

would die.

After two days and nights of heated discussions between the two factions of the

nation, they finally agreed to sign the "peace treaty papers.

Dragging Canoe and his six assistants signed the Treaty of Holston, which they

understood to be merely a "peace treaty