Chapter 3

LIFE IN THE OUT TOWNS

CRISES OF THE COLONIAL ERA

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Oconaluftee Island Park offers a reprieve, right in the middle of the Cherokee tourist district, just across the river via several pedestrian bridges. The island, a small sandbar in the river, is ideal to wander, picnic, fish. Usually, mallards are on scene. There’s not much wild about it, but okay, we’re in a city. The trail around the island leads into a stand of bamboo, which arches grandly overhead, creating shaded corridors and a room. Yes, bamboo is nonnative and invasive, but it does provide a pleasant outdoor enclosure. Think of a place to meet a friend for a chat.

But bamboo? Why, oh why, is an invasive species right here in the middle of a world-renowned refuge for native plants and animals? The answer is, simply, European settlers and their livestock. Once, river cane, Arundinaria gigantea, might have thrived here. Alas, cattle happily eat native river cane; their hooves trample its rhizomes and roots. Over time, it dies and new plants take root. Invasive and exotic plants displace native flora.

River cane is more than a feature of the landscape, though it is that, too. Canebrakes prevent erosion and offer streamside habitat for birds and other critters. The stand of exotic bamboo is testimony to ecological, cultural, and economic losses the Cherokees endured in the eighteenth century. River cane is the essential material for many traditional items: blowguns, fishing rods, mats, and, most important, baskets, the kind known as double-walled and dyed with bloodroot and black walnut. These provided home furnishings and subsistence tools before the time of European traders and settlers. Next they became part of the trade business itself, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth as the craft and tourist trades developed. Unfortunately, as native canebrakes disappeared, the abundant supply of free craft material shrank and became rare, particularly as demand for them increased as the Cherokee craft business grew.

River cane is making a comeback in the twenty-first century. Cherokee, state, and academic groups are all working to establish new stands nearby. So although losses from European settlement and the capitalist capture of Native culture have been transformational for the Cherokees, key remnants of the culture have persisted and, over time, are reemerging.

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CONTACT BETWEEN the Cherokees and Europeans grew in North America during the seventeenth century, mostly in the form of trade. The English and French traded with Native American peoples for deer and other animal skins, providing firearms, ammunition, and goods in return. By 1700, the deerskin trade was well established throughout the Cherokee territories because of the high quality of Cherokee skins.1 Charleston exported more than 50,000 skins each year to England.2 This activity led to a shift in Cherokee society from a sustainable, subsistence economy to a market economy.3 British traders lived and traveled among the Cherokees, exchanging rifles and other manufactured goods for skins. The British traders were somewhat supervised and regulated by the royal governor of South Carolina, who set size standards for skins and their trade value in goods. As the British trade increased and outcompeted the French, the British mapped the Cherokee Nation as extending to “five geographically distinct areas that each contained ten to twelve independent towns.”4 These five areas comprised the Lower Towns in South Carolina; the Middle Towns on the upper Little Tennessee River; the Valley Towns around the upper Hiawassee, Valley, and Cheoah Rivers; the Overhill Towns in Tennessee; and, finally, the Out Towns along the Tuckasegee and Oconaluftee Rivers.5 Though the Out Towns were near key places such as Kituwah, and though they were important culturally because of the centrality of the mountains in Cherokee legend, they were literally outposts. Not well known to colonists before or after the Revolutionary War, the Out Towns were at a remove because of the ruggedness of the surrounding mountains. In fact, in many Euro-American period sources, the Out Towns are loosely grouped with the Middle Towns, likely because comparatively little was known about them.6 Ultimately, by the nineteenth century, the Out Towns became a stronghold of traditional Cherokee culture, and this conservative social temperament ironically—though in a way quite logically—caused the area to become the center of the Eastern Band after the Indian Removal of 1838.

For Cherokees living in the Out Towns, trade was their first contact with Europeans. Spanish explorers of the mid-sixteenth century such as Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo did not travel far enough into the mountains to reach the Out Towns even though they spent a good amount of time in other Cherokee territories, including some Middle and Valley Towns not very far away. In 1721, the United Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts sent Francis Varnod to the Out Towns to collect census data about them, and he visited Tuckareechee, Kituwah, Stecoe, and Nununyi.7 Varnod recorded that Stecoe (or Stecoa) was the largest town, with a population just under 300. Tuckareechee and Kituwha both had about 225 people, and Nununyi was the smallest community at the time with 160 individuals. From that time forward, the Out Towns appeared on both English and American maps, mostly to facilitate surveillance of Cherokee towns for news about the nation’s shifting alliances with other European countries.8 Additional Out Towns appear on these maps: Tuckasegee, Connawisca, Conuntory, Evanga, and Dick’s Village, as well as Oconelufty with its alternative names of Bird Town, Nick Bottom, and Cunnulrasha. Of these towns, Tuckareechee, Stecoe, Nununyi, and Oconelufty lay in the Oconaluftee Valley.

THE DEERSKIN TRADE

Hunting deer was a long established practice for Cherokees. The vast majority of Cherokee territory consisted of hunting grounds rather than land used for towns or even for crops. As the deerskin trade developed, the Cherokees folded hunting for trade purposes into the men’s seasonal routine: they hunted in the winter, sold skins to traders in spring, went to war with neighboring tribes in the summer, and bought ammunition from traders in the fall before the men set out for their mountain hunting camps as the weather turned cold and crop harvest ended. Women, too, were involved in the trade; they laboriously stretched and cleaned the skins.9 Once prepared, skins were bartered on a credit system rather than sold for cash value. The traders credited hunters the guns and ammunition that they needed before the hunt; in the spring when the hunters’ cache was ready, the Cherokees were compensated for the value of the skins they had minus that of the credited supplies. Hunters, then, could easily fall into debt to traders, especially during poor years or when other problems arose such as disease, continuing hostilities with neighboring groups, or encroachments by settlers into hunting grounds. Traders were also often in debt to partners who financed their business.

The immediate benefits of trade to the Cherokees were enormous: guns and ammunition for better hunting and for warfare; cloth and blankets for clothes and comfort; pots and utensils for easier cooking; and metal farming tools for easier work putting in and tending to crops. But other effects with more ambiguous outcomes were also set in motion. The deerskin trade shifted the subsistence economy to a market economy. Cherokees who once focused on fulfilling their clan and town’s immediate survival needs eventually began to see the appeal of surplus goods and material wealth.10 Over time, areas became overhunted and wildlife populations declined, affecting Cherokees’ diets and hunters’ ability to supply the necessary number of skins to traders. Financial debt resulted from lean hunting years. European diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza decimated the Cherokees in the eighteenth century, and for the most part, the traditional remedies and healers were powerless against the ravages of these diseases. Deaths from these diseases often wiped out whole towns and areas. Three periods of disease occurred: a smallpox epidemic in 1738, said to cause the death of half the tribe; epidemics of smallpox, measles, and influenza between 1759 and 1760, right in the middle of the confusion of the Cherokee War; and another smallpox outbreak in the years 1780–83.11 Such devastating population losses during times when the Cherokees needed to defend themselves from attacks by other tribes led to cultural losses: the loss of faith in traditional medicine surely challenged the Cherokees’ sense of themselves and their understanding of the world.

In addition, the Cherokees became embroiled in an international power play among the English, French, and Spanish; without the material needs and the complex relationships ushered in by trade with the Europeans, Native Americans would not have become entangled in such affairs. Before the deerskin trade, ethnic groups had regularly waged war over territory, to retaliate against past injustices, or even to take prisoners, who could become slaves. But trade in hides came alongside the Europeans’ struggle for continental dominance. The English held the Atlantic Coast, and the French were powerful along the Mississippi, in the Midwest, and in the Great Lakes. The Spanish dominated Florida and the West. Each European power wanted to reap maximum economic benefits for its home country and to secure and strengthen its position on the continent. In May 1751, South Carolina governor James Glen described the seriousness of these shifting relationships to New York governor George Clinton: “To one unacquainted with Indian Affairs, the Designs of the French may seem dark and doubtfull, their Projects improbable, and their Views very Distant. However, they are not less to be minded upon that Account. If British Governors are either indolent or neglectfull, it may prove very fatal to the Provinces.”12

On top of international competition, the English colonies competed with one another for the Native American trade: South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia worked for their own colonies’ advantage and punished the Cherokees when they tried to improve prices or increase deliveries of ammunition by bargaining with trade commissions of more than one colony. The Cherokees’ traditional reasons for war among ethnic groups were expanded by new pressures placed on them because of trade agreements and allegiances with Europeans. Citing terms from a treaty of 1730, the English demanded that the Cherokees aid them in their battles against the French and French-allied Indians on the Virginia frontier.13 Altogether, the Cherokees and other nations to the north and south found themselves in the midst of ever more complex cycles of aggression, retribution, and negotiation.

RUST ON THE CHAIN OF FRIENDSHIP

Given the Out Towns’ remove, one might think that they would be protected from the international intrigue and competition that resulted in the French and Indian War (1754–63). After all, their area was bordered by the Cowee Mountains to the south, the Balsam Mountains to the north, and the Great Smoky Mountains to the west.14 But the opposite was more the case. At midcentury, the Out Towns were known for their hostility toward the English as compared with the other parts of the Cherokee Nation. Because the Out Towns were remote, they were more exposed to northern Native American groups supported by the French.15 The encounters that Cherokees had with these French-affiliated Native peoples were, in turn, both friendly and hostile in nature. Northern Native Americans, supplied and incited by the French, attacked the Out Towns and the Overhill Towns. Further, the northern groups preached hatred of the English to the Cherokees, and sometimes these arguments made sense when the South Carolina governor was perceived as ambivalent or inadequate in his support of the Out Towns. Allegiances were continuously shifting.

An early instance of the doubts and stresses between the Out Towns and South Carolina traders and officials became known as the crisis of 1751. That spring a rumor spread that a white trader in the Out Towns was murdered and his goods were taken by people from Conuntory, Stecoe, and Kituwha. The murder, however, was a false report, though the trader, Bernard Hughes, was beaten and driven out of town and his goods were confiscated. Unfortunately, these events happened at the same time as other incidents: white intrusion into the hunting grounds, Cherokee accusations that traders used false weights and measures that exacerbated their debt, a raid by whites of a Cherokee camp along the Savannah River and the theft of 330 of their deerskins, and, finally, the murder of a white man’s servant and a Chickasaw man in an Oconee River store.16

A letter from the Raven, a chief of the Overhill (Tennessee) towns, to Governor Glen of South Carolina supplies an account of the Out Towns’ incident and shows how serious it was to the entire Cherokee Nation. In this matter the Raven quickly and obsequiously took the side of the English against other Cherokees, whom he called rogues, because he knew that all of the South Carolina trade was affected and that his towns must maintain the trade for their own protection. In part (and via a scribe), he wrote:

And the Raven desires that those Towns who done this Mischief should have no traders amongst them, that is Kenotory, Sticoe and Kittawa, nor yet no Indian nor Half-breed should be Factor from any white Man among them, till they acknowledge their Faults, and see the want of a white Man, and that they themselves, and their Women and Children should have wary Leggs to walk to Traders in other Towns to buy what they want.

The Raven sais that he and his head Men and Warriours has not forgot all the good Talks that they have heard from Time to Time, nor never shall be forgot, as long as Grass grows and Water runs, and we will hand it down to our young People comeing up, and graft it in their Hearts, as your Excellency has done in theirs, for they do not want to know any other People but the English, and they hope your Excellency will not let them suffer for those that has been the Rogues, as he and his Parts has put a stop to it all, but that you will let their Traders come up as usual, for the Good of both, for we are in great Want of Ammunition, and as we are outside Towns, the French are daily upon us, and for the Want of Ammunition, we don’t know how soon we may be cutt off.17

Chucheechee, the Warrior of Tuckasegee, one of the Out Towns, seconded the Raven’s concern about a trade embargo, writing to Governor Glen, whom he called “father,” on May 6, 1751: “The Warriour says he expects his father will send his Children Goods for they mourn for Goods, and hopes he will not stop Goods from them. … He hopes his Father will not stop the Traders from comeing with Amunition sonn for they are very much in Debt to the white People, and Enemies very many upon them from the Southward and Northward when they go off.”18 Just as these chiefs feared, on learning of these events, Governor Glen placed an embargo on all trade with all the Cherokee towns, not just the Out Towns or other hot spots. Glen also wrote to the chiefs of the Out Towns, stated that rust had appeared on their chain of friendship, and demanded that they turn over two men from each town, those most responsible for the attack:

Head Men and Warriours of Ketowah, As the Chain of Friendship which has so long subsisted between the English and your beloved Men, has of late contracted Rust among you in your town of Ketowaw, and as you have forgot of late the many good Talks that have passed between us, and your beloved Men, and as in your Town in a daring and insolent Manner you have broke open the Stores of our Traders, and publickly divided and shared their Goods and Skins among you, as if they has been Spoil taken from an Enemy, and not only threatned the Lives of those white Men and forced them to fly, for the Security of their Persons, but sent out a Party of you[r] People to pursue and kill them. These Robberies and Violences we are determined not to induce, but to have the Author of them brought to condign Punishment.

We therefore send you this Letter, which is to desire that you deliver up two Persons of your Town of those who broke open the Stores and divided the Goods, were met most Guilty and active against the English, and we do hereby declare that if they are not delivered up to us within two Months from the Date hereof, we will come up to your Town and take them by Force.19

The posturing on both sides of this correspondence, particularly the language of the Cherokee’s dependence and the governor’s patriarchal status, suggests that the two cultures were testing strategies to manage each other, all the while recognizing that a transition of power had already taken place.

The Cherokees responded by saying that no further negotiations would occur until trade was restored.20 In addition, the Overhill (Tennessee) Towns began discussions with Virginia traders to defy the embargo. Forced into action by this maneuver, Glen led the South Carolina trade council in drafting reformed trade regulations. These were presented to the Cherokees in November 1751, and the treaty was accepted. It required that the Out Towns pay for the goods stolen from Hughes and that the other simultaneous wrongs be resolved. The reforms consisted of thirty-nine points that attempted to clarify regulations and prevent future injustices of trade between traders and villages. These included standard prices and measurements throughout the Cherokee Nation, the establishment of districts consisting of several towns each, with assigned traders for each, prohibition of any rum trading, prohibition of taking slaves into Cherokee territory, prohibition of using an Indian as a trader or factor, and requirements on traders to keep records, report problems, and trade fairly or risk losing their licenses.21 The treaty resolved the crisis but did little to improve the ongoing disputes between traders and Cherokees because, after a time, accusations about high prices, inaccurate measurements, trade monopolies, and shortages of much-needed goods resurfaced. By the mid-1750s the international tensions with the French had escalated.

THE CHEROKEE WAR

In 1754, Chucheechee, the Warrior of Tuckasegee, asked that the governor build a fort in the Out Towns to supply security against attacks, as had already been promised to the Lower Towns. Knowing that the chances that this request would succeed were small, Chucheechee said he would settle for more ammunition: “If your Excellency does not think proper to settle a Fort at our Town as we have land very hilly, I beg your Excellency would assist us with Ammunition to enable us to defend ourselves against the Enemies that come to molest us.”22 But neither seems to have happened, and attention shifted from the Out Towns, primarily to the Overhill Towns but also to the nation as a whole. South Carolina became concerned that the Cherokees were developing allegiances and agreements with the French or the Virginians. They ignored the Out Towns because their location was less strategic than the Overhill Towns’ in providing a buffer zone between areas of English and French influence.23 Consequently, the Out Town Cherokees were shortchanged by the English in South Carolina and became desperate for ammunition. Their anxiety comes through clearly in a letter from the Tuckesaws (Tosate of Tuckasage and Tosate of Slocke) to Governor Glen in October 1754:

With submission to our Brother the Governour and the Beloved Men of Carolina, we return you Thanks for the Powder and Bulletts you sent us to defend ourselves against our Enemies. We received but two Bags of Powder and four of Bulletts which is but a small Quantity for seven Towns, we having the Enemy as bad against us as the People over the Hills, and the Chief of the Ammunition that was sent up was carried over the Hills, and we beg that the Governor and the beloved Men will be so good as to send us up seven Bags of Powder and fourteen Bags of Bullets, that is one Bag of Powder and two of Bulletts for each Town to defend ourselves and the White People that live amongst us for the Enemy is so hot upon us that we can hardly go from Town to Town. And if you please and think proper to send us Pistols, Cutlashes, and small Hatchets, Flints to defend ourselves we shall be very glad for we have News of a great many Enemies comeing upon us, and we beg that this Letter may not be forgot as our last was as we have sent our Token as you told us to send it when we were in Want and we desire an Answer to our Letter as we remain in brotherly Freindship.24

Governor Glen responded by promising three bags of powder and six bags of bullets while simultaneously noting his surprise that more was needed and while proposing a meeting of Out Town and Overhill chiefs with him in Charleston for discussions about “some Things relating to the Wellfare of the Cherroekee Nation which I have much at Heart.”25 That meeting in early 1755 led to South Carolina’s promise that it would build a fort near the Overhill Towns so that the Cherokee frontier would have English protection and so that the Cherokees would agree to join the English in fighting the French and their allied Native Americans in Virginia. The plans for the fort, which became Fort Loudoun in Tennessee, took years to be realized because of disputes between Virginia and South Carolina about its financing, delays in the expedition to site and construct the fort, and disagreements and rivalries between the two officers in charge of the project. Fort Loudoun was finally completed on July 30, 1757.26 Though the Out Towns were not primarily involved in the events of the next several years owing to their location and comparatively small numbers of warriors, they suffered horrible consequences from the acts of the more powerful and political Lower, Middle, and Overhill Towns.

By this point, the Cherokees had wavered in their promise to fight for the English, but they eventually agreed when they were offered a bounty for the scalps of Frenchmen and French-allied Native Americans and after they were promised new guns and ammunition for the battle. But instead of going to war in Virginia, the Cherokees went to the Ohio River Valley. Disputes arose about the bounty paid on scalps, the insufficiency of traders and trade goods coming to the towns, and the Cherokees’ debt to traders. In addition, small-scale disruptions emerged among the Cherokees in the Lower Towns and settlers in western South Carolina; these included raids, thefts of cattle and horses, and, in late 1757, the murder of four Cherokees and the theft of their skins by settlers. These events began the breakdown of trust that caused the Cherokee War of 1758–61.27 Hostilities continued to mount, but eventually the Cherokees assembled a large force to fight for Virginia in the campaign against the French Fort Duquesne, located in what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Once the Cherokee warriors arrived in Virginia (en route to Fort Duquesne), however, the English were slow to begin their campaign and some of the Cherokees decided to return home. They plundered as they traveled through southwest Virginia. When they refused to return stolen horses and property, the settlers attacked and killed a number of warriors. Once the Cherokees reached home, they demanded revenge and threatened attacks against the closest English settlements—those in South Carolina. In response, the South Carolina governor embargoed trade, again. Next, the Cherokees attacked settlers in the Carolina backcountry and renewed trade negotiations with the French.28

In an ill-fated effort to resolve these disputes, a large delegation of Cherokee chiefs traveled to Charleston to meet with the governor. After an agreement similar to the previous one was reached, however, Glen held the delegation against its will and moved them to Fort Prince George, in South Carolina, as hostages. After a few days, all but twenty-four of the Cherokees were released. The remaining hostages included Cherokee head men as well as representatives of most Cherokee towns. Although the Cherokees understood and practiced the taking of captives after war, often to supplement their own populations after losses in battle, they did not understand why the British had held their leaders as hostages; they were insulted and felt that the governor acted in bad faith. Consequently, the incident caused the Cherokees, led by Ogan’sto’, also known as Oconostota, to come to Fort Prince George and lure the commander, Lt. Richard Coytmore, out of the fort for negotiations. When the British officer was ambushed (and mortally wounded) along with two others, the soldiers inside the fort shot and killed the hostages. Retaliation came as Cherokee warriors attacked backcountry white settlements and cut off supply lines to Fort Loudoun. In the spring, the Cherokees began a siege on Fort Loudoun that continued through the summer of 1760. In August, the officers of Fort Loudoun surrendered and left their ammunition in the fort. They walked out and toward Fort Prince George, seeking refuge. The morning after their departure, the Cherokees attacked them at their campsite in a meadow. Their commander was captured and tortured to death; several others died during the attack, and a few were lost in the fray. Most survivors were taken to the Overhill Towns as captives; a very few escaped and were led to safety by Cherokee friends and protectors.29

In response to the fall of Fort Loudoun and the attack on its soldiers, in May 1761, the English sent Lt. Col. James Grant through the Middle and Out Towns in a campaign of complete destruction. Grant set out from Fort Prince George with about 2,500 men. He razed fifteen towns, destroying all crops, an estimated 1,500 acres. This offensive reached the Out Towns on June 25 with an Indian corps and 1,500 regular troops. Over four days Grant and his men destroyed the crops and burned the houses of Stecoe, Conuntory, Kituwah, Tuckareechee, and Tessante.30 An account in the September 19, 1761, issue of the South Carolina Gazette reported that the Cherokee men fled to the Overhill Towns while the women and children went to the mountains.31 Seven Cherokees were captured and one was murdered by Mohawks serving in Grant’s company. On July 9, Grant and his soldiers returned to Fort Prince George. The English and Cherokees reached a peace agreement with the same terms that had been offered before Grant’s campaign, so the campaign accomplished little in the effort to resolve the ongoing disputes and misunderstandings.32 The terms reopened trade to the Lower Towns; demanded the return of prisoners, stolen goods, and livestock; and prohibited the French from building forts in the Cherokee Nation.

The effect of Grant’s campaign on the Out Towns was ruinous. It ended not only their trade with the English but, more critically, their occupation of a number of towns. After 1761, all the Out Towns but Stecoe and Tuckasegee were likely abandoned. From this date on, the English grouped the Out Towns with the Middle Towns on maps.33 Though many Out Town residents probably relocated to other town areas, most likely the Overhill Towns, small groups stayed in Oconaluftee Valley and moved up into the mountains, where they lived in homesteads and hamlets rather than organized towns with council houses.34 Perhaps because the Cherokee War showed many white soldiers the high-quality farmland of the area, land encroachments continued into Cherokee hunting grounds despite joint efforts by the English and Cherokees to establish boundaries.35

The Out Towns’ defeat in the Cherokee War terminated their documentary history during the last forty years of the eighteenth century. No traders lived or traveled through them. When naturalist William Bartram traveled in the Cherokee Nation during the spring and early summer of 1776, he reached the former Valley Towns to the south near the Valley and Nantahala Rivers of North Carolina, but he did not venture north toward Oconaluftee.36 The Out Towns seem to have been forgotten until the last of the Americans’ raids on the Cherokee Nation in the late summer and fall of 1776 during the Revolutionary War.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR RAIDS

Quite reasonably, the Cherokees sided with the English in the American Revolutionary War. Cherokees valued the deerskin trade, and they appreciated the boundaries that the English had established and tried to honor between settlers and Cherokee hunting grounds. The Cherokees also believed that the Americans would quickly be defeated. Unfortunately, their choice of ally was mistaken for long-term stability; it only further endangered them. The Americans moved against the Cherokee Nation early in the Revolutionary War to suppress Cherokee attacks on illegally located white settlements. In early August 1776, Col. Andrew Williamson of South Carolina destroyed the Lower Towns, and in late August, Gen. Griffith Rutherford of North Carolina conducted raids against the Middle and Valley Towns. Rutherford reached the Tuckasegee River but did not follow it north. He sent Col. William Moore to complete the campaign in late October 1776, probably with orders to destroy Stecoe and other villages on the Tuckasegee and Oconaluftee Rivers.37

Moore had a small force of ninety-seven men, and over the course of twenty days they marched to Stecoe, plundered and burned it, as well as three other camps. After Stecoe, Moore and his men turned north and followed a smoke sign toward an unknown camp. They came upon the Oconaluftee River and found a deserted camp, probably Bird Town, and then traversed a mountain into a cove and found the confluence of Soco Creek and the Oconaluftee River.38 There they apprehended prisoners, “two squaws and a lad,” and followed them up Soco Creek to another quickly abandoned but well-stocked camp.39 They plundered and then probably burned the camp. Going north, by way of Richland Creek Mountain, Moore’s men found a road, which they followed back to South Carolina. In his report to Rutherford, Moore says that, against his preferences and arguments to the contrary, his soldiers insisted on selling the prisoners into slavery and the plunder for cash, for a total booty of $1,100.40 Though the Out Towns suffered few casualties from Moore’s campaign, it once again decimated Cherokee occupation of them. Just a few mountain villages and farmsteads remained. Intriguingly, a careful reading of Moore’s report suggests that Nununyi, the town that once existed in the middle of today’s downtown Cherokee, North Carolina, was not discovered at all during the raid because Moore and his men did not follow the Oconaluftee far enough north to reach it.41 Sadly, it is not known whether the town even existed at the time because it does not appear on revolutionary-era or later maps. This question illustrates just how deep the mystery remains about Cherokee occupation of Oconaluftee Valley after 1761 and until the early nineteenth century.

In late 1780 and early 1781, Col. John Sevier of Tennessee made the final assault on the region. He led a small force of about 150 men over the ridge of the Great Smoky Mountains and attacked and then burned the town of Tuckasegee on the river. Before returning to Tennessee via an overmountain route, he also burned two other towns and several villages, but he likely did not reach Cherokees living along Oconaluftee River.42

Hostilities with militias continued until the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War. After that, white settlers persisted in their skirmishes over land until 1794, by which time much of the remaining Cherokee Nation, despite land cessions made in treaties, was occupied by white settlers, and the Cherokee population was greatly reduced and dispersed. Though communities continued to exist in the Out Towns, their populations were very small, sometimes just a family or two.43

The upheavals of the eighteenth century affected every aspect of traditional Cherokee life. With the decline and eventual loss of the hunting grounds, men were encouraged and eventually forced by the dominant market economy to abandon their roles as hunters and warriors. They had to become farmers; their families depended much more than before on agricultural production for subsistence and on surplus for participation in a growing market economy. Women lost status as they were placed within the home, a smaller and more domestic sphere of influence than they had previously held. The communal mode of town life and its traditions were disrupted, and families became more isolated on their farms, separated from extended family members within and outside of their clans. Over time, as private ownership of property replaced communal land holdings, inheritance practices shifted from matrilineal to patrilineal, a shift that further disempowered women. And psychologically, the Cherokees could no longer live in the moment as part of a nation and community; to a much greater extent than ever before, they had to accept individual responsibility for their existence and to worry about their individual prospects and futures.44 Similarly, the settlement patterns of the Cherokees changed from “very compact, homogenous entities with social and political life revolving around the townhouses” to a town model that was “a sprawling community of farmsteads extending for as much as two miles along the bottomlands.”45 In addition, the Cherokees shifted from building houses and townhouses with a wattle and daub technique to building log cabin homes and wood shingle roofs, adopting building styles of the American settlers.46 In the mountains, perhaps some trade goods such as plows and metal tools would have remained after the English and American raids of the second half of the eighteenth century; these would have been preserved over years of use.47

The last decade of the eighteenth century forced the Cherokee Nation to make additional land cessions, including the area that now comprises the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In the Treaty of Holston of 1791, a quarter of the park area was ceded to Americans, and another section to the south was ceded in 1798. Then in February 1819 one quarter of the entire Cherokee Nation was ceded in a treaty made in Washington. These cessions included the remainder of the land in the Smokies as well as all of the area of the former Out Towns and Middle Towns.48

Although the towns vanished, the changing Cherokee occupation of the mountains in the late eighteenth century led to an “ecological revolution” whose vestiges are apparent even today.49 Large cooperative Cherokee towns and communal agriculture were replaced by single family farms whose traces on the landscape persist in the settlement patterns they created between “fields, homes, and roads” and the landscape features of “mountains, forests, streams, and river.”50 In other words, the places that humans established toward the end of the eighteenth century became the basis for the roads, farms, stores, and towns that developed in the next century. These were oriented, to one degree or another, toward larger population centers, not away from them. Valley residents may have prized their peace and quiet in the mountains, but they were also engaged in agriculture, craft production, and the harvesting of forest products that linked them irrevocably to the larger world. The chain of connection that they held may not always have been one of friendship, as once existed (at least in name) between the South Carolina governor and Cherokee village head men, but it was a chain nonetheless.