Chapter 5

CIRCUMVENTING THE TRAIL OF TEARS

LUFTY CHEROKEES HOLD ON

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BY THE MID-1830S, national events once again affected the lives of everyone living in the North Carolina mountains, though the Cherokees especially endured great upheaval, hardship, and uncertainty. The infamous Treaty of New Echota was signed at the close of 1835 by a handful of Cherokee chiefs representing a minority of the people. It committed the Cherokee Nation to removal west; it was ratified by the U.S. Senate by one vote in 1836 and allowed the Cherokees two years to move to the new Cherokee territory. Even though the treaty was challenged and resisted, ultimately the Cherokee Nation faced forced emigration via the calamitous and cruel journey called the Trail of Tears.

Will Thomas launched an effort to gain the state’s support for the Lufty Cherokees to remain in North Carolina. He encouraged fourteen citizens of Macon and Haywood Counties to sign a statement certifying that the Lufty Cherokees followed North Carolina laws and behaved as citizens, that they were more temperate than some whites, and that they were making progress in farming. This memorial, dated January 31, 1836, is signed by business associates of Thomas’s, including Scroop Enloe; three members of the Hyatt family; George W. Hayes, who was part of the Epsom Salts Company; John Shuler; and two members of the Love family, with whom Thomas had a long friendship and multifaceted business associations. Although not all of the signers were residents of Oconaluftee Valley, valley residents were represented in the group and kin to a number of the signers, so it seems likely that the white residents were not entirely hostile to the community of Lufty Cherokees.¹

In the fall of 1836, the Lufty Cherokees held a meeting at their council house to decide what to do in the face of forced removal. Two men were asked to stand a few feet apart to form a gate, and those who wanted to remain in North Carolina were asked to walk through this gate. All present took this action, confirming their agreement with Yonaguska, who was also on the scene, that if they moved west, the white men would soon want that land, too.²

Next, Thomas got the Haywood County Court to send a statement to the governor describing the Lufty Cherokees as peaceful and hardworking and affirming that they were already citizens. Ultimately, the General Assembly of North Carolina passed an act to shield the Lufty Cherokees from fraud once the removal had occurred, acknowledging their right to stay only indirectly. Because of their unique status as “citizen Indians” in North Carolina, Thomas was able to argue in Washington that the Lufty Cherokees had the right to remain on the land that he was beginning to purchase for them in Qualla and along the lower Oconaluftee Valley. In September 1837, the federal commissioners responded to a petition that the Lufty group, consisting of about 330 individuals, be allowed to remain with preliminary approval, another ambiguous acknowledgment of their unique status.³ Consequently, the Lufty Cherokees were more apprehensive observers to removal than its victims. Nonetheless, they felt that their security was at risk and worried that their status might change unexpectedly. As always, Thomas advised a nonconfrontational approach to the whites, sobriety, Christianity, and cooperation with authorities.

THE TSALI LEGEND

Even though they were not targeted by the harsh removal process, the Lufty Cherokees were closely involved in a famous episode of the Trail of Tears, that of Tsali. The story of his family’s efforts to remain in their homeland was the sole incident of open Cherokee aggression against the U.S. soldiers during removal and has become the founding myth of the Eastern Band. Though many accounts have been published with varying facts, motivations, interpretations, and consequences, contemporaneous U.S. Army correspondence and a recently discovered memorial by Tsali’s wife, Nanih (or Nancy), provide a factual basis of the events that later were revised into legend.⁴

By August 1838, the U.S. Army realized that about 300 noncitizen Cherokees were resisting removal by living in the fastnesses of the North Carolina mountains. General Winfield Scott, who was in charge of the removal, ordered several detachments to begin rounding up these fugitives. In late October, Thomas and Cherokee runners, who preceded the mounted troops and attempted to persuade fugitives to surrender peacefully, were assisting three lieutenants. Their involvement was an attempt to disassociate the Lufty Cherokees from those in the nation who faced removal. On October 29, one of these lieutenants, 2nd Lt. Andrew Jackson Smith, captured fifteen Cherokees along the Tuckasegee River. When he learned that Cherokees were present farther south at the mouth of the Tuckasegee, Smith divided his company, sending the captured group ahead to Fort Cass, located along the Hiwassee River, near present-day Charleston, Tennessee, while he proceeded with three soldiers to capture twelve members of Tsali’s family on October 30. Tsali, or Charley, was a Cherokee in his sixties who lived along the Nantahala River; his family included his wife, Nanih, three sons, one daughter, a son-in-law, and several grandchildren. According to a subsequent account by Nanih, Tsali had requested an exemption from removal like the Lufty group but his was not accepted. This is why his extended family had gone into hiding. Will Thomas was accompanying Smith in the roundup and was likely joined by several Lufty Cherokees as runners. The next day, as Lieutenant Smith was moving Tsali’s family into custody, he learned that the previously captured group of fifteen Cherokees had escaped from his sergeant, so Smith rushed his group to rejoin the rest of his command in hopes of recapturing the escapees. Though Thomas had been with Smith and Tsali, an unexplained accident caused him and the Lufty Cherokees to stay behind on this fateful travel day.

The going was rough, and the young children of Tsali’s family slowed progress. The military account states that the soldiers gave up their horses so the children and Nanih could ride them, in order to ease the way and cover more ground. As dusk arrived, Smith spied that one of Tsali’s adult sons had a “dirk knife,” which was quickly confiscated. Shortly after, Tsali “raised the war woop,” according to Nanih, and Smith saw another son draw a small axe. Before Smith could order its seizure, the second son killed one of the soldiers by splitting his head in two. A second soldier was quickly killed by a blow to the head with the butt of an unloaded rifle, carried by one of the sons. The remaining third soldier was wounded by a tomahawk. The three Cherokee men then attempted to seize Smith, but because he was on horseback, he was able to escape along the trail. Soon Smith encountered some of his own men, but by then darkness had fallen, so they stopped their search for Tsali’s family after returning to the place of the attack.

The motivations for the attack have been much debated. A late-in-life account by Wasseton, or Washington, a teenage grandson of Tsali’s, asserted that the soldiers became impatient with Nanih, who was tending to the needs of a young child, and that when she was hurried with the child on horseback, she fell off the horse and her foot got caught in a stirrup, causing her to drop the child, who fell to the ground, hit a stone, and suffered a crushed skull and instant death. This grim accident angered Tsali and his sons.⁵ These details explaining why Tsali’s family may have been incited to rebel against the soldiers, however, are not included in the military reports and correspondence. In her account, Nanih does not state that she or a child had been harassed or abused. Instead, she explains that Tsali had become enraged by the forced removal and the loss of property and security that it entailed, and he compelled his sons to join him in an attack to gain his family’s freedom or die trying. She portrays Tsali as the instigator of the attack.⁶ Though it is impossible to know the actual details of these events and the motivations of the participants, it seems likely that Nanih would have recalled the death of a child, accidental or not. Perhaps Nanih’s version is more accurate in this regard.

Tsali’s family escaped into the mountains. Local lore tells us that they hid at a site named Tsali’s Rock, a rock ledge within the park boundaries, located along the Left Fork of Deep Creek, ten miles north of Deep Creek Ranger Station. Though not a cave, the rock provided shelter underneath that was large enough for several adults. It was surrounded by thick rhododendron with a stream nearby.⁷

The morning after the attack, Smith followed his standing orders and returned to Fort Cass, abandoning his search for Tsali’s family. When the news of the murders reached General Scott, he ordered detachments sent to North Carolina to find and punish the family, now considered fugitives. Col. William S. Foster was the senior officer of this mission. Seven detachments set out between November 7 and 15 to different parts of the western mountains and Foster headquartered at Joe Welch’s farm on the Little Tennessee River. Will Thomas offered assistance and joined 1st Lt. C. H. Larned to search along the Oconaluftee River. General Scott described the Cherokee view of the incident in a letter to the War Department:

Utsala (or Euchella) headed another family in the environs of Valley Town along the Little Tennessee.⁹ He is the same man who had successfully sued a white settler over his 1819-era reserve. Sometime after the murders, Thomas met with Utsala and his group, who were themselves hiding in the mountains and hoping to avoid removal. In an 1844 letter to General Scott, Thomas explained that he recruited Utsala and other “outlying Indians” in the hunt for Tsali’s family by promising them their freedom for the effort.¹⁰ Soon after, on November 18, Foster received a petition from thirty-two white heads of households in the area of Joe Welch’s farm (including Welch) to permit Utsala and his group to remain in North Carolina because they were “a well disposed peacible inoffensive body of people … and have been verry useful to us the inhabitants of this district.”¹¹

Then, the next day, Utsala’s group and some Lufty Cherokees led by Salonita, or Flying Squirrel, captured Tsali’s oldest son, Nantayalee Jake, and his son-in-law, Nantayalee George, along with Nanih, Ancil, Tsali’s daughter, and a granddaughter. Additionally, the Utsala and the Lufty Cherokee Indians, along with a mounted company of soldiers, were reported to be in “close pursuit” of the remaining fugitives. Tsali’s son Lowan was found in the next day or so, along with some other members of the family, including Wasseton. After Smith, Thomas, and Welch identified them as the murderers, Jake, George, and Lowan were executed by some of Utsala’s group and in the presence of the army regiment. According to an account published at the time in the Hamilton, Tennessee, Gazette, once blindfolds were tied around the captives’ eyes, three warriors aimed for the culprits’ hearts and three aimed for their heads.¹² Wasseton, about age sixteen, was spared because of his youth. Colonel Foster subsequently proclaimed Utsala and his group exempt from removal because of their assistance in the search for the murderers; they were to join with the Lufty Cherokees. On November 24, Foster and his company, the Fourth Infantry, departed. From the date of Nanih’s statement, July 18, 1843, which was transcribed by Will Thomas, it is apparent that she and the others of the Tsali group were ultimately permitted to stay in Qualla as well.¹³ On November 25, Utsala and another Cherokee, Wachacha, captured Tsali near Yonaguska’s former reserve on Governor’s Island on the Tuckasegee. They executed him where he was taken captive.

It is a sad tale of desperate people in dire circumstances. Unlike the popularized version, Tsali did not nobly surrender his family and life so that other Cherokees might remain in the homeland. The Lufty Cherokees had already been spared removal, yet they knew that cooperation with whites was key to their long-term survival. Utsala and his group of about a hundred benefited because of Thomas’s offer. But Tsali himself was a head of a family, like many others, who was trapped between legalities and events beyond his control. If he was part of a plot among his sons to attack Smith’s company, it can be seen as his last move to resist. That the tale became the founding legend of the Eastern Band shows something about how the Lufty Cherokees, with help from Thomas, crafted their image for white sympathy. Early versions of the Tsali legend were published by Charles Lanman, a journalist who visited the Oconaluftee Valley in the 1840s and made the tale into a heroic drama, likening Tsali to Julius Caesar and Utsala to Brutus, perhaps with the encouragement of Thomas, perhaps not.¹⁴ By the late 1880s ethnologist James Mooney wrote a version, based on an interview with Thomas, that firmly established the legend of Tsali as martyr, and this one has been promoted for decades by the Eastern Band itself in the outdoor drama Unto These Hills.

The most detailed account of the story, reprinting and interpreting Nanih’s statement, was published in 2006 in a book chapter by William Martin Jurgelski. And a volume of the Journal of Cherokee Studies, published in 1979 by the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina, and edited by Duane King and E. Raymond Evans, reprints military correspondence between the principal military characters Scott, Smith, and Foster and others as evidence of a less glamorous tale. An introductory essay to the Journal’s archival sources provides an interpretation more in keeping with the facts and more congruent with Cherokee mythology. Tsali and his sons were guilty of a brutal crime, and they endangered the community of Lufty Cherokees through their acts. King and Evans suggest that these individuals were cast more in the role of social deviants or criminals than selfless heroes. They are like Selu and Kanati’s sons, who bring agriculture and hunting to the Cherokees after committing serious crimes, or like Spearfinger and Stone-coat, two other legendary villains of Cherokee mythology. After Stonecoat is captured, he is burned to death, but during his immolation he shares his wisdom about medicines with the Cherokees, helping them to thrive over the ages. In these myths, deviance and crime lead to new, heightened knowledge and civilization.¹⁵ Certainly, the Cherokees’ condemnation of odious crimes and participation in their resolution through justice and a return to peace are values that the myths share with Tsali’s story.

One coincidental outcome of the incident was that it brought Israel Carver to Oconaluftee Valley. Carver was one of the soldiers who searched for Tsali and his family, so he saw the lush farmland at that time. Though it is impossible to verify, Israel likely met Andrew Jackson Bradley, who also served as a private in the North Carolina Militia rounding up Cherokees before the Trail of Tears.¹⁶ Perhaps they formed a friendship that led to Israel’s meeting Andrew’s younger sister Mary along with the rest of the Bradley family. Mary and Israel Carver married in 1839. By the late 1840s they joined the Bradley family members who had moved to a farm in Oconaluftee in 1841. Israel and Mary were the parents of fifteen children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. One child, Aden Carver, was born in 1844. Aden became the quintessential mountain man. As a child, Aden tended the cattle that pastured up in the mountains above the family farm. His great-granddaughter, Janice Carver Mooney of Canton, North Carolina, told of a day when young Aden took salt to the cattle and on his return hike heard

As an adult Aden became diversely skilled as a farmer, carpenter, backwoodsman, and, most notably, a millwright. He lived many years of his life in the valley.

Despite the competing Tsali legends and the conflicting details, a proclamation made by the Cherokee Tribal Council in the 1990s established November 25 as a holiday in Tsali’s honor. The proclamation reads: “On November 25, 1838, Tsali was executed by Euchella and Wachacha. They used to be his neighbors. They were ordered to kill him so they could stay in North Carolina. Tsali was killed. We are still here. Tsali is a Cherokee hero.”¹⁸

THE VALLEY AFTER REMOVAL

The two decades between removal and the beginning of the Civil War saw the development of an established community among white farmers in the park area of the Oconaluftee Valley and Raven Fork and a concentration of the Cherokee community in the eastern parts of the valley. Though the white and Cherokee communities lived largely separate lives, nonetheless, they were neighbors. They certainly interacted regularly at Thomas’s store in Qualla, where a post office was established in 1839.¹⁹ No doubt they met while driving livestock along the Oconalufty Turnpike, as well as, occasionally, in church via the visits of circuit-riding preachers and cross-community congregation members. Also, they would have come together when Cherokees or whites were hired as day laborers for one of Thomas’s various enterprises or as workers on other whites’ farms. Harsh winters brought on sharing. Thomas gave corn and grain to Utsala’s group to help them survive the winter of 1839, and in 1842 the Lufty Cherokees sold corn to local whites after harsh rains caused crop failures.²⁰ Albeit generally harmonious, this close contact must have been tinged with some unease on the Cherokees’ part because of the fragility of their status as North Carolinians; they were wary of doing anything to annoy the whites and cause hostility.

Soon after the upheaval of removal ended, several patriarchs passed away, issuing in a new generation of community leaders. In April 1839, Yonaguska died, shortly after selling his land on Governor’s Island for $1,300 and moving to Qualla. After bidding his kinfolk farewell in the Qualla council house, the story goes that he passed on the leadership of the Lufty Cherokees to Will Thomas. However, it is important to note that Thomas was not tapped to be the chief of the Lufty Indians, an exaggeration of Thomas’s role propagated later, and mistakenly, by James Mooney and Thomas’s daughter Sallie Thomas Avery.²¹ After Yonaguska’s passing, Salonita, chief of Paint Town, became the head chief.²² Thomas became the key liaison between the whites and Cherokees because of his entrepreneurial drive and boundless energy for civic projects, his devotion to the Cherokees, and his rare legal and strategic skills for protecting their interests. He became a longtime friend and associate of Scroop Enloe, the third son of Abraham and Sarah Enloe. In 1839, he bought the Enloes’ farm at Stekoa Old Fields, the site of the Indian village that was raided during the Revolutionary War, now located in Whittier, North Carolina. Abraham, Scroop, and Wesley Enloe sold the 1,000-acre site for $3,400 to pay off their debt in Thomas’s store. The farm became his personal residence where he lived with his mother and later with his wife and family.²³

In 1841, Abraham Enloe died and the homestead in Oconaluftee was inherited by his son Wesley, who lived there—near the location of the park visitor center and Mountain Farm Museum—with his family for decades. Wesley was the twelfth child of seventeen and the seventh son of nine. By 1845, Jacob Mingus also had died; his homestead became the property of his third son, Dr. John Mingus, who also lived until late in the century. Jacob and Sarah Mingus’s older sons, Jacob Jr. and Ephraim, already had farms in Big Cove by this time. By the way, both Sarah Enloe and Sarah Mingus survived their husbands by several decades, late into the nineteenth century.²⁴

As more and more descendants of the first white families married and needed land for farms, they moved up the valley to settle on higher tributaries of the river, once the bottomlands became full and the terraces occupied. The number of farms, the size of the earliest farms, and the acres cultivated increased gradually over time. At the high end of farm production was Wesley Enloe. Census data show that in 1849 he farmed 200 of the 500 acres he owned, producing 25 bushels of wheat, 50 of rye, 800 of corn, and 50 of oats. He had livestock worth $934 (eight horses, twelve milk cows, twenty-four beef, two oxen, fifteen sheep, and sixty hogs). On a smaller farm higher up the valley, Samuel Beck cultivated 50 of 90 acres, yielding 14 bushels of rye, 6 of wheat, 10 of oats, 300 of corn, and 50 pounds of tobacco. He owned four horses, six cows, eighteen sheep, and twelve hogs.²⁵

Self-sufficiency remained the default way of life; the farm families typically did everything for themselves: planting, harvesting, blacksmithing, carpentry, care of livestock, cooking, laundry, spinning, weaving, and sewing. Family labor was the norm. A few of the most prosperous white farms in the valley hired help and owned slaves. In 1850, Rufus G. Floyd owned four slaves, as did Samuel Sherrill. By 1860, the total number of enslaved persons on white farms in Oconalufty Township was sixteen.²⁶ Male slaves worked the farm, though typically female slaves did domestic work indoors.²⁷ As one of the most prosperous farmers and businessmen in the area, Will Thomas bought, sold, and owned slaves as well; he likely owned more than a dozen in the 1840s and had thirty-eight by the time of the 1860 census. Cudjo, Yonaguska’s slave, became a trusted member of Thomas’s household after the chief’s death. Thomas also hired Cherokee, white, and Black people as workers on his farm, in his stores, and in support of other projects. In 1840, he paid a group of Cherokees $358.95 for road repairs.

A few tradesmen lived in the valley, including Nathaniel Blackburn, a tanner, and William Davis, a miller. Gunsmith Couch resided up along the creek that bears his name, and notably, the Cherokee Salola (Squirrel) became an accomplished blacksmith and gunsmith at this time. One of his rifles survives and is part of the collection at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina.²⁸

Though a few development projects such as the Oconalufty Turnpike and Epsom Salts Manufacturing Company were operating at this time, an important one began during this era. The first mill on Mingus Creek was built as “a small whirling bucket overshot wheel gristmill” owned by the Mingus family.²⁹ Along with other, smaller mills scattered in the valley, it served families in the area until after the Civil War, when the first turbine mill was constructed at the same site. Also, Thomas was running five stores in western North Carolina. These had tradesmen available, including a tannery at the Qualla store. Thomas accepted barter and credit. The Cherokees often traded corn, ginseng, and other herbs for cash, coffee, sugar, and fabric.³⁰

THE LUFTY CHEROKEE

After removal ended, roughly 700 Cherokees comprised the Lufty Cherokees around Qualla, including Utsala’s group as well as a few others who had successfully evaded the soldiers during the fall of 1838. Though some white mountain folk remained unhappy about their presence and periodically pressed the federal government to address their status, both state and federal interest in the Lufty Cherokees fluctuated mercurially in the coming years. Additional federal and state removal attempts occurred in the early 1840s, but they were poorly financed and rather half-hearted, and the remaining full-blood Cherokees in North Carolina persistently resisted them.³¹ Throughout these years, Thomas lobbied in Washington, D.C., and in the state for the Lufty Cherokees’ share of the subsistence funds due from the Treaty of New Echota and for a secure status for them. By September 1839, he succeeded in gaining them an allowance from the federal government, but this small victory was undermined over the years by contentious and spotty disbursements. Payments for subsistence and removal were finally won in 1855, but were not paid at all until well after the end of the Civil War, in 1875.³² The Cherokees’ poverty is one reason Thomas bought land for them with his own money, in expectation that he would be repaid once the government claims were settled. He bought many tracts of land from the original residents of Oconaluftee Valley, particularly those who owned land along Raven Fork in Big Cove, including, eventually, Sophia Mingus, Ephraim’s widow, Abraham Mingus, and Samuel Sherrill. The Cherokees were not legally sanctioned to own property independently. To circumvent this legal conundrum, Thomas created the Cherokee Company in 1845. On paper, the company was formed to build a silk and sugar industry among the Cherokees. Mulberry saplings were imported for the silk effort, but they did not thrive in the climate. In time the company became a holding company through which the Cherokees could own land. As president of the company, Thomas could buy, sell, and pay taxes on land for them.³³

In the lower valley, Thomas helped establish five townships to organize Cherokee civic life and provide a significant measure of self-governance, despite their nominal citizenship in Haywood or Jackson County, the latter of which was established in 1851 and in honor of President Andrew Jackson. The five Cherokee towns were Bird Town, Paint Town, Wolf Town, Yellow Hill, and Big Cove; each had a chief and tribal council that resolved disputes, loaned money, and collected taxes on the tracts of Indian land that were privately owned. Once collected, the tax funds would be passed on to Thomas, who would pay them for the band as a whole, often paying personally for the taxes on communally held property. Salonita (Flying Squirrel) became chief of Paint Town, and Utsala was chief of Wolf Town.

Some records exist from the council meetings at Wolf Town, kept by Inoli, or Black Fox, during this period. They document community activity such as church attendance, loans and schedules for repayment, and the institution of new community policy.³⁴ For example, in May 1859, the Wolf Town council announced new, more bureaucratic rules for marriage. A loose translation of the Cherokee records reads:

THE WANDERING STAR’S TRAVEL NARRATIVE

One of the best sources of information about the lives of residents during the 1840s is the Whig journalist Charles Lanman, who traveled to the area in May 1848 and published an account of his travels in Letters from the Alleghany Mountains. In Qualla, Lanman met Thomas, who supervised his visit into the Smokies and, subsequently, with the Cherokees. Apparently, Thomas wanted to promote the newly established Epsom Salts Manufacturing Company and organized an expedition to Alum Cave in the company of a surveyor employed by Thomas. Lanman described the four-day trek to the cave. After the group had to abandon their horses at the top of the crest, his party made “a pedestrian pilgrimage of about six miles up and down, very far up and ever so far down, and over every thing in the way of rocks and ruined vegetation which Nature could possibly devise, until you come to a mountain side, which is only two miles from your starting place at the peak.” Next he climbed “a precipice, in a zigzag way, which is at least 2,000 feet high, when you find yourself on a level spot of pulverized stone, with a rocky roof extending over your head a distance of fifty or sixty feet.” Once Lanman reached the bluff, he was impressed by its height as well as the “alum, Epsom salts, saltpeter, magnesia, and copperas” in its walls. Similarly, he rhapsodically described the view as “one of the most remarkable and impressive scenes that I ever witnessed … a glorious picture.” These descriptions are entertaining to park visitors familiar with Alum Cave and the trail to reach it. Perhaps more informative is the account of his lodging in homes on his way up and down the crest along the Oconaluftee.³⁶

On the way up, Lanman seems to have stayed with Dr. John Mingus, given the mention of the host’s abilities in medicine. Dr. John, as he was known, had received some premedical training in Hamburg, Germany, early in his life but reportedly had returned home because of his poor vision.³⁷ In time, he became the local physician and treated patients throughout Haywood and Macon Counties in the 1840s and 1850s. A letter from the doctor on March 20, 1845, to the itinerant Methodist preacher David Ring, who was traveling in Virginia at the time, described remedies for a malady that sounds like influenza. The remedies range from the sensible (keep the bowels open and the patient neither too hot nor too cold) to the elaborate. For example, Dr. John suggested (maintaining the details of the original letter):

These remedies must have seemed effective to patients and families for years, considering that he was always known as Dr. John. After the Civil War, however, he seems to have given up medicine. Perhaps he was compelled to do so because in an affidavit from May 29, 1868, T. H. Welch states that John Mingus had not practiced medicine for the thirteen years he had known him.³⁹

Nonetheless, it seems that John Mingus was the likely multitalented host of Lanman during his visit to the Smokies:

The next morning, the party picked up “a guide, who happened to be one of the proprietors of Alum Cave.”⁴¹ The guide must have been Robert Collins, whose home lay along the turnpike route and who was one of the investors in the company. Pressing ahead and approaching the cave, they met two Cherokees on a bear-hunting trip and stayed overnight with them: “We were admitted under their bark roof, and with them spent the night, sleeping upon the ground. We remained a sufficient length of time to enjoy one supper and one breakfast; the first was composed of corn bread and bear meat, and the second of trout (caught in a neighboring stream) and a corn cake fried in the fat of a bear.”⁴² Though Lanman visited in May, bad weather shortened the trip; hail and several inches of snow fell during their trek, so the journalist and his escort spent the return evening at Collins’s home:

Even though Lanman commented that one could judge the wealth of a mountain farmer as inverse in proportion to the number of dogs he owned and the number of children he had, he received generous, if somewhat exotic, hospitality in his overnight accommodations.⁴⁴ The locals were also free with their time and stories. It is easy to speculate that Thomas arranged the journey as part of his tireless and multifaceted public relations campaigns aimed at cosmopolitan audiences in the state capital, in Washington, D.C., and in other large cities.

This notion may be documented even more fully in Lanman’s positive portrayal of the Lufty Indians in three lengthy letters. The first described their political status, advancement toward “civilization,” and a church service. The second focused on a ball game, including all its rituals and settings, and the final letter provided biographical sketches of the most notable Cherokee individuals of the time: Yonaguska, the blacksmith Squirrel, Chief Utsala, and Tsali, as well as brief mentions of the achievements of Sequoya, and the leaders of New Echota before removal, Elias Boudinot, John Ridge, and Major Ridge. In particular, Lanman’s account of Tsali’s escape and execution launched the refugee into the Cherokee pantheon by being the first to portray him as the martyr of the tribe whose death made possible the Lufty Indians’ persistence in North Carolina. Throughout, the message was consistent: the Lufty Cherokees are “the happiest community that I have yet met with in this Southern country, and no candid man can visit them without being convinced of the wickedness and foolishness of that policy of the Government which as always acted upon the opinion that the red man could not be educated into a reasonable being.”⁴⁵

Lanman offers a “comprehensive summary” that praises the Cherokees for their high levels of literacy in their native language, their achievement in agriculture and the mechanical arts (such as making their own clothing and manufacturing farm equipment), the shift of the women’s domain into the house and out of the fields, and their temperance, honesty, and morality.⁴⁶ When Lanman accompanied Thomas to church at the town council, he approved of the service:

If church marked the Indians’ advancement, the ball game testified to their traditionalism. The two-day event was narrated in detail beginning with the activities of the evening beforehand: a dance and going-to-water ritual afterward. The game-day account was detailed as well with descriptions of preparing the field, starting the game, maidens giving tokens to their favorite players, the “varsity” game by the young men followed by a going-to-water ritual and awards ceremony, the boys’ game as a second event, and, concluding the day, a second community dance in the “lodge” or council house. The game itself was described as like lacrosse in which players use a “spoony stick” to advance a ball to a goal but involving one-on-one wrestling as well in exercise “of a character that would kill the majority of white men.” The account documented the clothes of the spectators (“holiday attire, so that feathers, shawl turbans, scarlet belts, and gaudy hunting shirts were quite abundant”), the home of a chief who provided supper (a cabin of “hewn logs” on a “farm of twenty acres on the mountainside, about one-fourth of which was in a state of cultivation, and planted with corn and potatoes. He had a tidy wife and several children, and his stock consisted of a pony, a cow, and some ten or a dozen sheep”), and the shape and size of the council house (“built of hewn logs, very large and circular, without any floor but that of solid earth,” but including seats for the chiefs and a large fire in the center).⁴⁸ There is no doubt that the Cherokees were just as welcoming as the whites, but their public relations objectives seem obvious to today’s reader at the letter’s end:

Will Thomas must have been present to serve as interpreter and cross-cultural liaison.

AN ERA OF CHURCH BUILDING

Beyond the special occasions orchestrated for travelers, community events involving churchgoing remained prominent parts of cultural life. During the twenty years between removal and the Civil War, church buildings were constructed by the white Baptists and Methodists in the valley, and the Cherokee Methodist Mission also acquired its first building. The first log church at Smokemont was built in 1841 by the Lufty Baptist Church. Hughes Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church was built at the foot of Hughes Ridge in 1846. Constructed on land donated by Rafe Hughes, it had a hewed log structure and large fireplace, and it served as both a place of worship and a school. The Echota Methodist Mission, located in Soco Valley, existed as early as 1840 and added a school in 1850. Today the mission operates as the Cherokee United Methodist Church.⁵⁰

The churches functioned as places of social contact between races. At the mission, Cherokee chiefs and converted Christians led the services, though David Woodring, or, more familiarly, Davy Ring, served as pastor. Tsali and Anitsa were church leaders. A tribute to Anitsa after his death August 1, 1874, quotes his valedictory: “I talked to sinners and I prayed for them; and now if I am not able to talk to them, if now my speaking is past, I am ready to go. All of you know how I walked here below.”⁵¹

The records for Lufty Baptist Church show that a few Cherokees and enslaved people were received as members as early as 1840. A list of members includes the following entries:

Conot, Nelly	Cherokee, Received August 1840
Conot, Tom	Cherokee, Baptized August 1840
Jane, a Black woman belonging to Widow Floyd	Received and baptized, 1849
Geesca, Van	Cherokee, Received by baptism, July 1850
Geesca, Willa	Cherokee, Received by baptism, July 1850
Black man belonging to Wesley Enloe	Received by experience, June 1858
Black girl by name of Ardilla	Received by experience, August 186552

Worship by enslaved persons was regularly compelled by white masters, so it is difficult to know if they attended because of their own desire or that of their owners.⁵³ Ardilla, who became a member in 1865, would have done so after emancipation. Even so, these non-white members suggest that there may have been an open spirit in the Baptist congregation.

Pastors also served both Cherokee and white churches. Richard Evans of Tennessee was elected the “co-supply” pastor of Lufty Baptist Church along with C. B. Mingus in 1852. Though the census listed his occupation as a farmer, he preached in many churches, including one in Bird Town, where he used an interpreter. This church had about a hundred members, sixty of whom Evans had converted and baptized. Ultimately, Evans moved to White Oak Flats, which became Gatlinburg, in Tennessee, and started Evans Chapel. Just before the Civil War, in 1860, William Henry Conner began preaching at Lufty Baptist Church and purchased the Collins homestead. He, too, was active among the Cherokees and organized churches at Bird Town, Soco, Big Cove, and Yellow Hill; he helped establish the Cherokee Baptist Association and taught at a Cherokee church school as well.⁵⁴ In 1851, Henry Jackson Beck was ordained as a deacon in Lufty Baptist Church and remained active for decades. At some point, he conducted a mass marriage ceremony “where 400 Cherokee couples were united in matrimony. Many of them were grandparents, having already had their family before legalizing their union for the state.” Beck also served as a church clerk and moderator, as Sunday school superintendent, and as a superior court clerk.⁵⁵

Churches were important locations for education generally, though literacy was not high. Well-to-do white heads of households could read and write, but perhaps not all members of the family were literate.⁵⁶ Some Cherokees could use the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah, though very few could speak, write, or read English. Despite limited formal education in the valley, during the twenty years after removal both the whites and Cherokees developed and stabilized their communities to a considerable degree. The Cherokees obviously faced monumental challenges from the state and federal government during this period, which they were able to meet with assistance from Thomas and other white neighbors. It seems likely that despite acts of generosity and recognition, however, they would have been chagrined to live in Jackson County, a new county named after the president who led the removal program. The social achievements of this time would soon be tested during the Civil War, and the bonds formed would shape the ways the community met the moment.