A Cherokee Encyclopedia

Introduction

Who knows how long the Cherokees have existed as a distinct people? Tales from the oral tradition vary as to the Cherokees’ origins. One tale has them coming from an island off the coast of South America and migrating north, presumably all the way to the Great Lakes area, and then, following wars with other Iroquoian-speaking peoples, migrating south again until they eventually settled in the area that we now know as the Old South. Another tale has them coming in from the far north through a land of ice and long nights. Of course, there are still those who would have all American Indians coming from Asia across a Bering Strait land bridge. Whatever the truth of their origins, once the Cherokees had been in the Old South long enough, they made it their own, for there is also a tale from the oral tradition, recorded by James Mooney, that tells of the creation of the Smokey Mountains and the origins of life there.

Mooney also recorded a tale that he called The Massacre of the Ani-Kutani, which tells of a powerful priesthood that once existed among the Cherokees and of its eventual overthrow by popular uprising. The tale ends by saying the Cherokees never again allowed a central government to develop among them. At the time the first Europeans encountered the Cherokees in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they found them living in autonomous towns, each with its own government. These towns—about two hundred of them, scattered over an area that today is divided into the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia—were held together only by a common culture, a common language, and clans. There was nothing like a central government.

The importance of the clan system in this scheme cannot be overemphasized. Cherokees have seven matrilineal clans. Descent was traced through the female line. Women owned their homes and their gardens. Children belonged to their mothers’ clans. Most of what we would call law today was clan business. All seven clans were represented in each town, so if any Cherokee were to travel far in Cherokee country to a town he had never previously visited, he would find clan relatives living there.

The town government seems to have been made up of a war chief and a peace chief, each chief having his own advisory council. The simplified explanation of this system has it that the peace chief presided in times of peace and the war chief in times of war. In actuality, the peace chief was likely in charge of what we would call the internal powers of government and the war chief of the external powers. In other words, the peace chief was concerned with local matters including ceremonies, local disputes, and daily life. The war chief was responsible not only for war-related matters, but also for any dealings with people outside of the town—trade, alliances, disputes of any kind, and so on.

We know that the women played an important behind-the-scenes role in town government, but we do not know just exactly how that worked. It may have been as formal as a female mirror image of the perceived government by men. In other words, there may have been female advisors to the chiefs and female advisory councils. Or the relationship may have been less formal than that. The only thing we know for certain is that a woman known variously as the Beloved Woman, War Woman, and Pretty Woman had the power of life or death over captives. It is probable that she had other powers as well.

And we know that the Europeans were slow in figuring out just what the women had to do with decision making. At first, it seems they simply thought that the Cherokees were slow in making up their minds. At last, they discovered that the men had to go home after a meeting and talk things over with the women before they could render a decision. Englishmen thus said that the Cherokees had a petticoat government and that "among the Cherokees, the women rules [sic] the roost."

In addition, Europeans thought that if they made an agreement with one Cherokee town, all Cherokees should abide by that agreement. Why they should have felt that way even though each of the thirteen English colonies insisted on its own sovereignty, is anyone’s guess. At any rate, in 1721, frustrated with their attempts at dealing with the Cherokees, Englishmen persuaded them to appoint a trade commissioner, one Cherokee with whom they could deal and expect all Cherokees to abide by his promises. In exchange, the English appointed their own trade commissioner. The Cherokee appointment was Wrosetasetow. (See Wrosetasetow for an attempt at deciphering this name.)

Up until the time of the appointment of Wrosetasetow, Cherokee experience with the newcomers had been capricious and sporadic. In 1540, the notorious Hernando De Soto expedition passed through the Cherokee country, stopping probably at Guaxule (in present-day Georgia), Canasagua, and then on into the Creek, or Muskogee, country. Fortunately for the Cherokees, De Soto and his men were apparently on their best behavior during that time. The Cherokees gave them food and places to stay, and the Spanish went on their way. It was twenty-six years before the Cherokees were bothered again. In 1561, Spaniards under the command of Juan Pardo moved onto an area of the coast of South Carolina and established a fort called San Felipe. From there, expeditions went out into the country of the Cherokees and the Creeks. Again, the Cherokees received little trouble at the hands of the Spaniards. To this day, there are traces of Spanish gold mines in the old Cherokee country, but the Spaniards hid the fact of the mines from the rest of the world, and we have no documentation of what was going on. We can only assume a certain amount of Spanish influence on the Cherokees from this period.

Cherokees first met the English in 1654. The English of the Virginia colony had just concluded a long and bloody war with the Powhatans. A group of approximately six hundred Cherokees moved into the territory of Virginia, settling on the site of an abandoned Powhatan town. A battle followed in which the Cherokees soundly defeated the Virginians and their allies the Pamunkeys. Documentation of this skirmish and the events surrounding it is scarce. The Cherokees eventually abandoned the site.

James Needham and Gabriel Arthur from Virginia visited the Cherokee town of Echota (also known as Chota) in Tennessee, on the south bank of the Little Tennessee River, in 1673 in an attempt to establish trade relations. The trip turned out to be disastrous for Needham when he was murdered by Weesocks who were visiting the Cherokee town. Arthur, however, stayed at Chota for nearly a year before some Cherokees took him back to Virginia. In 1690, Cornelius Dougherty, an Irishman from Virginia, settled among the Cherokees as a trader. He started a mixed-blood Cherokee family and lived with the Cherokees for the rest of his life. The next year, South Carolina colonists murdered a number of Cherokees.

Several Cherokee chiefs went to Charleston with presents for the governor two years later, attempting to establish peace and form an alliance. The agreement was made, but the governor of South Carolina apparently continued to instigate wars with several Indian tribes, including the Cherokees, in order to obtain captives to sell into slavery. In 1715, in response to this aggression, the Yamassee attacked South Carolina in force. South Carolina managed to defeat the Yamassees at last, with the Yamassee survivors moving in with the Creeks or fleeing to Spanish protection in Florida. Chiefs from the Cherokees’ Lower Towns in present-day South Carolina and northern Georgia went to Charleston again, suing for peace, and South Carolina sent Colonel George Chicken with a detachment into Cherokee country. He moved on into the Upper Towns, where he found the chiefs a bit more defiant. They wanted guns and ammunition to assist them in their wars with other tribes. An agreement was reached.

Then in 1721, Governor Francis Nicolson of South Carolina invited the chiefs of thirty-seven towns to Charleston. The governor wanted to simplify the business of dealing with Cherokees. He made a treaty with them that set up a system of trade, drew a boundary line between the territory of the Cherokees and that of the English, and appointed an agent to superintend their affairs. He also suggested the appointment of Wrosetasetow as head chief of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees agreed, and the appointment was made. It is doubtful that the Cherokees understood the role to which Wrosetasetow had been appointed in the same way that Governor Nicholson understood it, but it was the beginning of the modern Cherokee Nation.

This encyclopedia is presented as a quick reference to most things Cherokee: the several Cherokee nations that have appeared in history, people and places and things important to each of them, and individual Cherokees who have distinguished themselves in various walks of life and in different periods of Cherokee history. A few white men are listed in this book, all of whom were closely associated with Cherokees in a positive way. John Sevier, Andrew Jackson, Wilson Lumpkin, and others of their ilk have received more than enough coverage elsewhere, and I have no desire to give them more. Readers looking for entries such as feathers, Cherokee use of, and specific Cherokee myths will be disappointed. I have not included those kinds of things. They can be looked up readily in James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee, Charles Hudson’s The Southeastern Indians, and other sources. It is inevitable that I have missed certain people and items. Some readers may be astonished that I have left out someone or something. I can only say that I have done my best to include entries for anything that the average reader might want to look up regarding Cherokees.

I have used the expressions full-blood, half-breed, and mixed-blood unashamedly. They are expressions still in use by Cherokee people and are useful and meaningful, if not always entirely accurate. And I have included many Cherokee outlaws, in part because a majority of them were not really outlaws at all, but rather resisters, and in part because Indian Territory created a number of outlaws. Many of these outlaws, real or fabricated, are much more important to Cherokees today than are most of the chiefs. One final word: I have not limited the people included herein to those who are official members or citizens of one of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. Not all Cherokees have the proper paperwork to document their heritage. In general, I take people at their word. Let those whom Arigon Starr calls the NDN Police point their fingers.

A.

Abram of Chilhowie

In 1775, following the Cherokee sale of lands to the Transylvania Company, which Dragging Canoe opposed, Dragging Canoe organized raids against what he considered to be illegal squatter communities on Cherokee land. He assigned one of the three raiding parties to Abram of Chilhowie. Abram’s party was to attack the white settlements at Watauga and at the Nolichucky River, running through North Carolina and Tennessee. Abram returned from his raid with a few prisoners, including Mrs. Bean and Samuel Moore, who was burned at the stake. Mrs. Bean was rescued by Nancy Ward, known to history as the Ghigau, Beloved Woman. Abram was killed under a flag of truce in 1788 by a Franklin militia led by John Sevier.

Ada-gal’kala

Ada-gal’kala (Attacullaculla, Attakullakulla, the Little Carpenter) was born around 1712 and died in 1778. He was the recognized principal chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1762 until his death in 1778. He first appears in written records in 1730, when Sir Alexander Cuming took seven Cherokees with him to London. One of the seven was Ada-gal’kala, although he was not yet known by that name. As a young man, Ada-gal’kala was called Okoonaka (British spelling of the time), which translates as White Owl. Englishmen called him Owen Nakan. He was likely in his twenties at the time and was described as a small man, slight of frame. He was certainly the youngest of the Cherokees in the group. Ada-gal’kala himself said in later years that he was the first to agree to make the trip. The others only consented afterward.

Ada-gal’kala (far right). Engraving by Isaac Basire, London, 1730. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

They left for England on the Fox, a man-of-war, on May 4, 1730, from Charleston, South Carolina, and landed at Dover on June 5. From there they went to London, where they were put up for a time at the Mermaid Tavern and later in an undertaker’s basement in the Covent Garden section. On June 18, they saw the king at Windsor. Following that occasion, they were given new clothes, and in these English outfits they posed for a portrait that may have been painted by either Hogarth or Markham. In the portrait, Ada-gal’kala, on the far right, is holding a gourd rattle in his right hand, with his left hand resting on the haft of a knife hanging from his belt.

The seven Cherokees were taken to see all the sights of London, including a play, the Tower of London, the crown jewels, and a couple of fairs. On September 29, they signed the Articles of Friendship and Commerce. Their interpreter, Eleazar Wiggan, gave them a translation of the document after the signing. When they discovered that they had acknowledged the king’s right to the country of Carolina, they talked among themselves and considered killing Wiggan and the Cherokee who had been their spokesman, one Oukayuda. At last, however, they decided that because they had no right to cede lands anyway, the agreement could not be binding. They would leave the matter in the hands of the authorities at home. The Cherokees departed for home from Portsmouth on the Fox on October 7. Ada-gal’kala had by this time learned to speak some English.

In 1736, the French sent emissaries to the Cherokees in an attempt to form an alliance. Ada-gal’kala was instrumental in convincing the Cherokees to reject them. Then around 1740, he was captured by the Ottawas, who were allied to the French, and taken to Canada. During his captivity, Ada-gal’kala came to be treated as an Ottawa, for whatever reason, becoming good friends with Pontiac. He also met any number of Frenchmen, including the governor of New France.

When Ada-gal’kala returned to the Cherokee country in 1748, he found the South Carolina traders cheating the Cherokees. Ammouskossittee was now the Cherokee emperor, and Guhna-gadoga was in effect running things for him. Ada-gal’kala became a trusted advisor of Guhna-gadoga. The South Carolina traders’ behavior and his own eight or so years among the Ottawas had turned Ada-gal’kala toward the French, and he visited with the French-allied Shawnees in Ohio and the Senecas in New York. He returned to the Cherokee country with a rumor that Governor James Glen of South Carolina was trying to entice the Creeks and Catawbas to attack the Cherokees. But the Cherokees attacked South Carolina settlers and settlements instead, and South Carolina imposed a trade embargo.

Many of the Cherokee towns, however, were still strongly in favor of the English, and they agreed to South Carolina’s terms for resuming trade. One of those terms was that the Little Carpenter be delivered up to them for having incited all the trouble. Ada-gal’kala and some of his allies went to Virginia, where they attempted to establish trade with that colony because South Carolina was not fulfilling its obligation. Virginia was hesitant to start trouble with South Carolina, but South Carolina’s attitude did soften somewhat. When Lower Town Cherokees visited Charleston, Governor Glen asked only that they oblige Ada-gal’kala to make a trip to Charleston to explain his behavior. It is instructive to note the absence of an emperor from all these shenanigans and the nonexistence of any real concept of nation in the Cherokee towns’ behavior.

By this time, Ada-gal’kala was already known by his new name. We do not know when that came about or why. Ada-gal’kala can be translated as Leaning Wood, and the British had come to call the man the Little Carpenter, presumably playing on his name and the fact that he was known to be able to craft a bargain [skillfully]. His reputation was already firmly established.

Ada-gal’kala may have been pro-French, but he probably also discovered that the French were unable to establish trade with the Cherokees and that the Cherokees’ best interests lay with the British colonies. In an attempt to convince the British that he was not working in French interests, he raided against French Indians, killing eight Frenchmen and taking two prisoners. With the evidence of his triumph, he went to Charleston to meet with Governor Glen. His visit was successful, bringing a promise that trade conditions would be improved and a great many presents given. He told the governor that he was the spokesman for the Cherokee Nation.

Glen’s promise of improved trade was not fulfilled, and in 1754, with the threat of a war between France and England in the air, Virginia attempted to enlist the aid of the Cherokees. The meeting was friendly but unfruitful, so in the next year the Cherokees were again meeting with South Carolina. This time Ada-gal’kala persuaded Governor Glen to meet with him on the banks of the Saluda River, half the distance from Charleston. At this meeting, the governor again promised improved trade. He also promised a fort to be built in the Cherokee country for the protection of the women and children while the men were away at war. He said that he would send Ada-gal’kala and some other Cherokees to England. In exchange, Ada-gal’kala gave up Cherokee land and declared himself and his people children of the great King George. He said that his voice was the voice of the Cherokee Nation. The fort was not built.

Virginia became desperate in 1755, when General Edward Braddock’s army was defeated by the French. They asked for another meeting with the Cherokees, and at that meeting Virginia agreed to trade with the Cherokees and to build a fort. The Virginians built their fort in the Overhills in Tennessee. There were still pro-French Cherokee towns as well as persistent rumors from those towns that the British were preparing to march against the Cherokees. More meetings were held with both South Carolina and Virginia, and the wily Ada-gal’kala continued playing one against the other.

He had, however, developed a taste for rum, and on one occasion he went very drunk into Fort Prince George in South Carolina and made a motion as if he would strike Captain Raymond Demere, the fort’s commander, in the face with a bottle. Several of the Indians there took Ada-gal’kala away. The next day he apologized profusely to Demere for his behavior while drunk, blaming everything on the liquor.

The South Carolina fort was at last built and called Fort Loudon. Ada-gal’kala once again led a raid against the French and afterward visited Charleston, where he presented the governor with scalps. He complained again about some traders’ behavior, and one trader was placed on probation. The new governor did not, however, approve of the promised Cherokee visit to England. Back in Chota in Tennessee, Ada-gal’kala found that a Cherokee named Old Hop (see Guhna-gadoga) had been entertaining the French in his absence. He told Captain Demere that Old Hop was a fool who could do nothing without his help. And when Cherokees complained about the traders, he said that it was because they had allowed the French to come among them.

By 1758, Ada-gal’kala had become the most influential leader of the Cherokees. Old Hop still held the title, but everyone seems to have known the truth. Influential though Ada-gal’kala may have been, no one could exert absolute control over the Cherokees. Many Cherokee towns still acted as independently as ever. Although Ada-gal’kala met with the Virginians and even went on an expedition or two with them, other Cherokees were fighting with Virginians. Some Cherokees also killed South Carolina settlers. South Carolina governor William Lyttleton responded by restricting trade with the Cherokees once more. In 1759, Ada-gal’kala went on an expedition in Illinois against the French, presumably to show his unfailing support of the British.

In Ada-gal’kala’s absence, Ogan’sto’, the great war leader, and a number of other Cherokees went to Charleston to ask that the latest trade embargo be lifted. Governor Lyttleton had them surrounded and taken prisoner. Then he marched with a force of seventeen hundred men to Fort Prince George in South Carolina, taking the hostages along with him. When Ada-gal’kala returned from Illinois and heard what had happened, he marched to Fort Prince George with a British flag carried before him. Lyttleton met with him and demanded that the Cherokees who had killed Virginians be captured and turned over to him for punishment. Ada-gal’kala agreed, but said it would be very difficult, if not impossible. He managed to come up with two of the guilty Cherokees, and Lyttleton released two hostages.

Ada-gal’kala then persuaded Lyttleton that he could not convince the Cherokees to cooperate with him in the matter of the guilty Cherokees without the help of Ogan’sto’, who was one of the most powerful men in the nation. He managed to secure the release of Ogan’sto’ and a few others. Ogan’sto’, however, remained strongly anti-English for the rest of his life. Then an outbreak of smallpox frightened the governor back to Charleston. Ogan’sto’ lured the commander of Fort Prince George out of the front gate and had him fired on and killed. Inside the fort, angry soldiers murdered all of the Cherokee hostages. Around this same time, Old Hop died and was succeeded by his nephew.

Ada-gal’kala, possibly seeing events coming over which he could exercise no control or possibly attempting to escape the dreaded smallpox, took his family to the woods to live in isolation. Ogan’sto’ laid siege to Fort Loudon. When Major Archibald Montgomery was sent to the aid of the besieged in the fort, Ada-gal’kala traveled there to see what he himself could do to resolve the situation. When Montgomery was ambushed and lost 140 men, he said that he had accomplished his mission and left the country. Fort Loudon was still surrounded.

When Captain Demere at last surrendered and abandoned the fort, the Cherokees discovered that he had betrayed them by destroying guns and ammunition, contrary to an agreement the two parties had reached, and so they attacked the retreating British troops. Ada-gal’kala ransomed his friend John Stuart and led him to safety. He later brought out ten more survivors of the Fort Loudon siege. With Ogan’sto’ ready to take the Cherokees over to the French side, Ada-gal’kala became even more important to the British.

In retaliation for Fort Loudon, the British sent a force out of Charleston against the Cherokees. Led by Colonel James Grant, the troops went to Fort Prince George, where Grant had a meeting with Ada-gal’kala. Grant was not to be dissuaded from attacking the Cherokees, however, and before he was through, he had destroyed fifteen Cherokee towns, and many acres of corn and had driven hundreds of Cherokees into the mountains. Grant met with Ada-gal’kala once more to talk of peace. This time he was ready to come to some agreement, but he demanded that four Cherokees be turned over to him to be executed in front of his army. Ada-gal’kala met with Governor William Bull of South Carolina, and the governor agreed to strike out the clause about killing four Cherokees. The peace was concluded.

In 1761, Ada-gal’kala asked Governor Bull to make John Stuart the British Indian superintendent, but the governor replied that he did not have that authority. He did use his influence, though, and Stuart was appointed the following year. Then, with the news of the death of Uka Ulah that year, Stuart acknowledged Ada-gal’kala as the (sixth) principal chief of the Cherokee Nation because everyone knew that he was the real leader of the Cherokees anyway. The title principal chief was, of course, in recognition of the fact that there were many Cherokee chiefs, at least two for each town. This British appointment may or may not have been a rubber stamp for general Cherokee opinion. It was, however, a major step in the direction of modern nationhood and the role of a chief executive. At one point in his career, Ada-gal’kala even referred to himself as the president of the Cherokee Nation.

The year 1763 marked the end of the war between France and England. In 1767 and again in 1770, Ada-gal’kala gave up some Cherokee land to Stuart. White settlers were swarming onto Cherokee land. Seventy families settled along the Watauga River, running in North Carolina and Tennessee, where they became known as the Wataugans. Under British law (the Proclamation of 1763), they were forbidden to purchase Indian land, so they formed a plan to lease it. Stuart’s assistant, Alexander Cameron, agreed, and so did Ada-gal’kala. The land was leased for eight years.

In 1774, Ada-gal’kala seems to have made a private deal with the Transylvania Company, owned by Judge Richard Henderson and Captain Nathaniel Hart of North Carolina. Henderson and Hart, aided by Daniel Boone, proposed to purchase twenty million acres or so from the Cherokees, forming middle Tennessee and central Kentucky. Ada-gal’kala went to visit Henderson and Hart to inspect the goods to be traded. On January 1, 1775, with six wagonloads of goods, they headed for Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River in northeastern Tennessee. The deal was concluded in March in spite of strong protestations from Ada-gal’kala’s own son, Dragging Canoe, from Cameron, and from Governor Dunmore of Virginia. The British objections were based on English law: Indian land could be purchased only by the king. The sale went through along with another private sale for the land that had been leased by the Wataugans.

When Dragging Canoe protested to Superintendent Stuart, he was assured that the sale would be nullified as illegal. He was told to be patient, but then the American Revolution broke out. A group of Cherokees went to visit Stuart and pledged their loyalty to Great Britain. Dragging Canoe became the war leader of the pro-British Cherokees. Stuart fled Charleston for his life and went to Florida. Ada-gal’kala went to visit him there, pledged his loyalty, and repented of his role in the Sycamore Shoals affair.

The Americans, as the rebels were now called, attacked the Cherokee towns with a vengeance, and Ada-gal’kala and Ogan’sto’ met with them to talk of peace. It was Dragging Canoe, they said, who was causing all the trouble, and because his towns had been burned by the Americans, he was no longer in the Cherokee Nation. He had moved into the Creek country and built new towns. He and his followers were being called Chickamaugas because they had built along Chickamauga Creek, a tributary of the Tennessee River. Colonel William Christian of Virginia said that the Cherokees could have peace only if they handed over both Cameron and Dragging Canoe. Ogan’sto’ agreed. Any response by Ada-gal’kala was not recorded. The two old men, sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, managed to get Christian to guarantee their neutrality in the war.

In 1777, the Cherokees gave up more land, and Ada-gal’kala agreed to provide warriors to aid Virginia and North Carolina when called on. He died the next year, at somewhere between sixty-six and seventy-eight years of age. (See also Dragging Canoe and Ogan’sto’.)

Adair, George

George Adair was born at Braggs, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, in 1887 and educated in Cherokee Nation public schools. He married Edna F. McCoy at Nowata, Oklahoma, in 1907. On September 19, 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and went to France with the 36th Division. He was pulled off the firing line and put to work with other full-blood Cherokees in the telephone service, where they transmitted military orders in the Cherokee language, thereby foiling any Germans who might be intercepting the messages. The Navajos in World War II were not the first code talkers!

Adair, William Penn

William Penn Adair was born in Georgia in 1830. His family moved west in 1837 before the Removal, becoming part of the Western Cherokees, later to be called the Old Settlers. He attended Cherokee Nation schools in what is now Oklahoma and later went east to study law. He was elected to the Cherokee Nation’s Senate from Flint District in 1855, 1857, and 1859. At the start of the Civil War, he joined Stand Watie’s Confederate Cherokees and was colonel of the 2nd Regiment of Mounted Volunteers. At the war’s end, he spent much of his time in Washington, D.C., representing the interests of the Southern Cherokees. His wife, Sarah Ann McNair, died during the war, and in 1868 he married Susannah McIntosh Drew. He was elected to the Cherokee Nation’s Senate again in 1871, this time from the Saline District. He was an uncle to the later famous Will Rogers, who at birth in 1879 was given the name Colonel William Penn Adair Rogers. Colonel Adair died in 1880.

Adams, K. S. Bud

K. S. Adams, known as Bud, was born in 1923. He served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II in the Pacific theater. After the war, he became a wildcatter in Texas and eventually made his fortune in the petroleum business. In 1959, he was instrumental in starting the new American Football League and became owner of the Houston Oilers. In 1968, he moved his team into the Houston Astrodome, making them the first professional football team to play in a domed stadium. In 1996, he moved the team to Nashville, Tennessee, and renamed it the Tennessee Titans. A registered member of the Cherokee Nation,