Ani'yunwi'ya Culture Report
Ani'yunwi'ya Culture Report
Ani'yunwi'ya Culture Report
By Christopher Gunn
Introduction
In 1673 James Needham and Gabriel Arthur set out from Virginia to find new trade
partners beyond the country of the Occhonechees. They followed an Occhonechee guide called
Indian John, and eventually came to the territory of the Cherokees (a large swath of land in the
Appalachians, covering much of present day North and South Carolina, Georgia, and
Tennessee), who they called Tomahitans. 1 After meeting with the townspeople and chief, and
noting their enthusiasm for trade relations, Needham left Arthur behind at a Cherokee town to
learn their language while he returned home with knowledge of the new trade path. He traveled
with an accompanying group of Cherokee hunters and his guide, Indian John. En route, Indian
John fell into an argument with Needham and after a series of threats, shot him in the back of the
skull, killing him. The murder dismayed the Cherokee hunters, who feared that the blame would
be put at their feet, thus destroying any chance of the desirable Virginian trade. Indian John
played on their fears, and convinced them that since war with the colony was inevitable, they
ought to return quickly to the town and also kill Gabriel Arthur. Arriving, they found the head
man away, and bound Arthur to a pyre of canes, intending to burn him to death. A visiting
Weesock Indian apparently took the lead, preparing a firebrand to light the blaze. Just as the deed
was about to be done, the head Cherokee returned, and running to the pyre demanded to know
who would burn the Englishman. When the Weesock stepped forward, the Cherokee leader shot
him dead, and rescued Arthur from death. As a result of this life saving action, the Cherokees
and the English established their first regular contact and began trade relations. 2
1
Both Tomahitan and Cherokee are foreign names applied to the tribe. The Cherokees’ own name for
themselves was ani yun wiya, which literally means “the real people.”
2
Abraham Wood, "Letter of Abraham Wood," in Early Travels in the Tennessee Country 1540-1800, ed.
Samuel Williams(Johnson City: The Watauga Press, 1928), 17-38.
2
Early in 1716 similar events played out, but on a grander scale. Tensions between
Carolina and a coalition of Indian tribes boiled over into the Yamasee war, a conflict which the
natives were handily winning. The war was a learning experience for the Carolinians, who
discovered that their best hope to avert the colony’s destruction was to appropriate the Cherokees
as allies. The Cherokees at the time were the most numerous and powerful factions in the region,
and had not yet entered the war on either side. Colonel Maurice Moore and a large force of
Carolinians went into Cherokee country in order to meet with their leaders and arrange an
accord. At the same time, delegates from the Creek tribe to the south also arrived in Cherokee
country, and hopes ran high for an alliance between all three parties. The Creeks, however,
secretly met with Cherokee head men and proposed a joint massacre of the English to rid the
land of the colony. Such a move would have been devastating for Carolina. Instead, much as
years earlier a Cherokee leader had rescued Gabriel Arthur, the Cherokee warriors rose up and
slaughtered the Creek delegation, cementing their alliance with the English. 3
The Yamasee war drove out the coalition Indians from the territories between
Charlestown and Cherokee country, opening it up to Carolinian settlements. These two incidents
made for a strong foundation for Anglo-Cherokee relations, and through the years the English
accorded the Cherokees “most favored nation” status, granting them better prices and access to
English trade goods. The two parties entered into a Treaty of eternal friendship, and English
Governors made visits to Cherokee towns. A group of leading warriors even traveled across the
Atlantic to meet the king of England and confirm the alliance in London. Yet in 1758, in the
midst of the French and Indian War, the Cherokees rose up and became one of the British’s most
dangerous native foes. This sub-theatre to the war, dubbed the Anglo-Cherokee War, was
particularly bloody and fueled the fires of colonial anti-Indian sentiment. The war was
3
Verner Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1928), 164-186.
3
devastating for the Cherokee, and they eventually made peace. Relations further unraveled as a
result of the Revolution, in which the Cherokee aided the British against the Patriots, and were
thus left in a very poor position after the British defeat. The diplomatic deterioration continued
unabated through the era of the early republic, culminating in the infamous “Trail of Tears” and
The reasons behind this deteriorating effect deserve analysis. Events and choices played
out in a certain way, but at the core of the issue lay divergent cultural values and the conflicts
arising from them. Culture groups interact with each other and with their environments in
varying ways, resulting in a dance through history of continuity and change. When, in 1492,
Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” he inaugurated an age of cultural collision. Two entirely alien
groups of people, European and American Indian, spent the next centuries in a prolonged
exchange as they made initial contact and began living in close proximity to one another. The
idea of an American “melting pot” is something of a misnomer; particularly during the colonial
period it was more of a cultural mosaic, with diverse culture groups staying together, but living
side by side, perhaps with a little blurring at the edges over time. Theoretically the Cherokee and
other Indian tribes could have been just more stones within that mosaic, but the extreme
dissimilarity between their folkways and the European cultures which came across the ocean
were too great. In the case of the Cherokees, the clashing values and ways of life created
mounting tensions, violent incidents, and ultimately an abiding animosity that an attempt at
cultural adaptation in the early nineteenth century proved too late to overcome. The aim of the
following work is to examine the key differences between the Cherokee culture and that of their
emigrant neighbors, demonstrating why they caused tensions and how those tensions manifested
in the events of history. Though any one of many eighteenth century Indian tribes would be
4
suited to such analysis, the close relationship between the Cherokees and the British, as well as
the tragic historical narrative leading to their forced removal in the Trail of Tears make them a
There are two major historiographical threads foundational to this analysis. The first is
the emergence of the “new social history” trend in the twentieth century and a shift from holding
a strict focus on the political elites to also including “the common man” (and woman) as worthy
of study. Scrutinizing how race relations, labor habits, and a myriad of other basic facets of life
characterized a people and affected their actions and reactions brought a whole new perspective
to the study of history. Historians could discover or infer broad cultural modes by careful
examination of the prevailing beliefs of target demographic groups and available accounts of
how people of different categories behaved in certain situations. The addition of statistical data
from census records or other observational accounts, or cliometrics, enhanced the light of
E. P. Thompson’s 1963 The Making of the English Working Class broke new ground in
telling the story of the common working class, a story which was as yet only in the peripheral
vision of the historical community. Thompson’s prolix work demonstrated a research approach
capable of constructing a historical narrative “from the bottom up” which was plausible as well
as compelling. A decade later in 1972 John Blassingame planted his flag on similar scholarly
territory from a different route with The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum
South. Blassingame sought to illuminate the lives of the lowest members of the social classes, the
enslaved. His work delved into the African roots of antebellum slaves, and analyzed how the
diverse mix of their cultural ways interacted with the colonial social landscape into which they
were involuntarily introduced by the transatlantic slave trade. The emphasis he put on the
5
transmission and continuity of African cultural ways into the New World, and subsequently how
those ways both wrought change and underwent change within that landscape, is extremely
Braudel and his concept of history as a constant flux of change and continuity, increasingly
influenced the broader academic world, including historians in America. Blassingame’s stress on
such themes certainly resembles the Annales approach. Braudel’s seminal work The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II introduced not only the idea
of history’s ebb and flow, but also the innovative idea that the Mediterranean acted as a cohesive
agent of commercial and cultural exchange, creating a community of interacting societies out of
what would otherwise have been disconnected parts. This idea of connectivity as an important
aspect of historical study spread, and historians began to apply it in what became “Atlantic
World history.” The model was a novel one, that a set of communities or societies existed
spanning the vast Ocean with a high degree of interconnectedness and cohesion. The key concept
that made this true is that of exchange. The Atlantic Ocean ceased to be a barrier and became a
bridge between continents, creating pathways of communication and commerce which linked
this set of societies together. Authors such as Jack Greene, Phillip Morgan, and John Thornton
produced works demonstrating the strength of studying individual societies within the context of
One work emerging from this historiographic soup of particular significance is David
Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. Fischer tackles the problem of continuity and change as it
4
John Blassingame, The Slave Community; Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1972); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books,
1966).
5
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip Ii (New York:
Harper & Row, 1972).
6
applies to various brands of English culture transplanted to North America with a brilliantly
organized methodology. Fischer divides each particular culture by folk ways, categories of social
life under which cultures can be defined and compared. He shows how four distinct cultural
hearths from four regions of Britannia became established on the east coast, and he expertly
analyzes their individual characters through precise subdivisions such as religious ways, food
ways, family ways, etc. The perspicuity and exactness of this analytical method lends it enormous
functionality. This present study employs such a methodology, and is thus deeply indebted to
Fischer’s work. 6
The second major historiographical thread behind this analysis of Cherokee culture deals
directly with the study of American Indian history: the rise of ethnohistory. The historiography
of American Indians is a long study of neglect bordering willful ignorance by the history
profession. Prejudice and ethnocentrism caused something of an amnesia effect, rendering the
natives of America static in the eyes of academia to the point of invisibility. This phenomenon
obscured the immensity of the entire field of pre-Columbian Indian history, as well as polluted
practitioners of history would arrive at the closest possible facsimile of truth it is vital that events
be considered from every vantage; it is thus essential that scholars adopt a historical
consciousness without a major element of the human population left out or thought to be idle.
Thankfully the long winter of neglect has thawed, and American Indian historiography has
bloomed into a fruitful field of study. The advent of ethnohistory marks a watershed moment
6
David Hacket Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 3.
7
the North American continent, comes out of the romanticized, nationalistic tradition of history
which so pervaded the budding United States. Very early European historians and observers of
Indian culture laid much of the groundwork for this perspective. James Adair, for example,
supplies us with much valuable firsthand information regarding Southeast Indian culture, but at
the same time his bias towards Old World civilizations led him to believe that signs of old,
complex societies among them must have been remnants from a migrating lost tribe of Israel in
the Indians’ ancestry. George Bancroft exemplified this dismissive perspective in writings such
as his History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent. Bancroft
characterizes American Indians as passive savages who would inevitably be displaced by the
‘higher civilization’ imported by Europeans. This “inevitablist thesis” portrays Indians (or at
least their culture) as intrinsically too ignorant, idle, and enslaved to their passions to be truly
dynamic agents in history. Even Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History
which gave lip service to Indian influences viewed them as peripheral, and only as important in
the context of how they informed the development of democracy among whites in the United
States. The sum result of this mindset was for these works to ignore American Indian influences
7
in American history.
The corrective to this trend began to emerge around the 1970’s, and can generally be
considered a function of the larger turn to new social histories. In the postwar political
environment Indian land claim cases created a practical need for better historical analysis in the
field, and the result was an array of historical, anthropological, and archaeological scrutiny being
7
James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London: E. & C. Dilly, 1775; George Bancroft,
History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
1858; Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1920).
8
brought to bear on the American Indian past. 8 The initial product of this study was the twenty-
three volume Handbook of North American Indians, published in 1978. Historiographically, the
turn away from inevitablist history resulted in the rise of ethnohistory, a somewhat specialized
field of multidisciplinary scholarship crafted to be ideal for the study of preliterate societies. The
combined use of diverse sources; including written documents, ethnographic data, linguistics,
and archaeological artifacts; characterizes nearly all of the deeper studies of American Indians.
An important and influential early work in this area is Gary Nash’s Red, White, and Black: the
Peoples of Early America, which gives American Indians and the similarly neglected African
application of the types of ideas about mutual exchange and its effects that Atlantic World
methodology really shines, and in stark contrast to earlier approaches, scholars such as Daniel
Richter have made an effort to view the exchange from a native point of view. This is the
innovation behind Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country: a Native History of Early
America, which uses the long history of Mississippian tradition and native civilization dynamics
as the context of the exchanges, rather than the usual European backgrounds. He has published a
more recent volume as well, Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts, which incorporates
the backgrounds of both sides for an even more balanced analysis. This area extends the more
focused field of American Indian studies in order to remedy the deficiencies of earlier histories
on the wider subject of colonial America. In John Demos’s recent book The Heathen School: A
Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic, he relates how even in situations
8
Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 337.
9
Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1974).
9
where Indians were horribly victimized, such as the Trail of Tears, they nonetheless acted with
The methodology employed for this study borrows heavily from David Hackett Fischer’s
Albion’s Seed, examining in turn each distinct category of Cherokee culture, called folk ways or
life ways, in order to give an idea of what Cherokee life in the eighteenth century was like.
Fischer’s work deals with groups of migrating cultural communities, and thus focuses on the
degrees of cultural continuity and change which occurred as those movements transpired.
Because the Cherokees represent an indigenous community which had lived in place for many
generations the object here is different. Instead of examining continuities over time, this study
aims to juxtapose native life ways against European. Special emphasis is placed on
demonstrating how the vast differences between the Cherokee folk ways analyzed here, and the
colonial folk ways fully explored in Albion’s Seed caused each group to act and react to each
other in particular ways. Because of this organization, the layout is conceptual rather than
mental map in order to place these cultural interchanges in the context of the larger interplay of
change and continuity in Anglo-Cherokee history. A brief chronology follows, arranging events
into three broad phases which characterize the progression of the diplomatic and cultural
The first phase began with Gabriel Arthur and the start of Cherokee-colonial trade, and
was generally characterized by good relations. These built to a culmination with the diplomacy
of a man named Alexander Cuming, and then progressed with mounting tensions as actualized
10
John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New
York: Random House, 2014; Daniel Richter, Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts (Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011; Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native
History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
10
cultural differences caused friction. Both sides benefitted a great deal from the trade in deer skins
and European commodities, but as white settlements crept closer to Cherokee towns, sustained
contact made cultural incompatibilities more apparent. The major changes in this phase of the
interaction were that decentralized Cherokee organization began the process of nucleation, while
colonists experienced mounting fear of their “savage neighbors.” The centralizing agent within
Cherokee society occurred because the colonists treated them as if they were a nation rather than
a loose jural community. In order to keep one independent member of that community from
bringing the wrath of the English down on all their heads, the Cherokees had to find some way of
effectively policing hitherto autonomous members. On the other side, the libertarian ways of the
Cherokee threatened colonial customs of slavery and strict patriarchal restraints, while the Indian
way of waging guerilla type warfare was terrifying to frontier settlers. This phase ended with the
control rogue elements failed. The conflict ended when British army forces marched through
Cherokee country burning towns and crops to the ground, forcing them to come to the
negotiating table.
The second phase saw increasing white encroachment of Cherokee lands, and increasing
attempts by the Cherokees to deal with those settlers. Colonists were unhappy with what they
considered were lenient peace terms given to the Cherokees by the British army, and while the
fear of Indians remained, it also began to catalyze an ingrained prejudice and militant animosity
against them. After the failure of the prewar centralization efforts, Cherokee headmen attempted
to do so with even more rigor, and to conciliate the colonists by ceding territory in a bid to buy
their favor. Younger Cherokee warriors, however, were not inclined to “go gentle into that good
night,” and when the British called for their aid in the American Revolution, they jumped at the
11
chance to push the interlopers back from their ancestral hunting grounds. In this act they broke
with the more peace minded beloved old men, and established the warlike Cherokee town group
of Chickamauga near present day Chattanooga. During and after the Revolution, they waged war
on the white settlers in a conflict which greatly increased animosity on both sides. Though they
had separated from the “peace faction” of Cherokees, both groups remained closely tied together,
and though the old towns often tried to pacify situations, their warriors just as often joined
Chickamauga raiding parties, and white retaliation did not spare them any more than it did the
militant towns. Eventually military campaigns by Anglo-American frontier leaders like John
Sevier broke their resistance and brought an end to this bloody phase of cultural interchange.
The final phase began with the Chickamauga surrender late in 1794. 11 With armed
resistance proving a futile way of dealing with the problems caused by cultural friction, the
Cherokees turned to all out appeasement and adaptation. Their new strategy was to Westernize,
to accept the United States government’s offer to “civilize” them. This process rapidly changed
Cherokee life to resemble colonial cultural values more than their own. It proves difficult,
however, to easily annihilate the deep roots of a peoples’ culture, and many of the changes were
merely prima facie. That being the case, the shift was a dramatic one, and Cherokee life changed
plantation economy greatly resembling their neighbors in Georgia and the Carolinas, and began
building churches and missionary schools rather than town houses with their sacred fires. At the
very least, they did these things alongside many older traditions. As a strategy for mitigating the
stresses of cultural friction it was an effective one, although it amounted to something of cultural
surrender. The timing, however, was too late. Cultural friction had already taken its toll in the
11
John Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their
Removal to the West, 1838 (Kingsport: Southern Publishers, 1938), 433.
12
guise of leaving a deeply ingrained anti-Indian prejudice on their white neighbors. This
animosity caused continuing tensions despite the Cherokee acculturation, and culminated in the
1838 tragedy of the Trail of Tears. This ended the final phase studied here, and was the end
In adopting David Hackett Fischer’s patterns of cultural analysis, this work aims to
ways, making it an admirable model. Adapting it to the Cherokee does not, however, come
without some issues. While Albion’s Seed examines the continuity of English folk ways as they
moved from the Old World to the New, the Cherokees had long lived in one general locale. The
tribe had moved south into the area in a major migration centuries earlier, but by the eighteenth
century it was only vaguely remembered in oral tradition, and lies beyond the scope of this study.
Thus, Fischer’s emphasis on continuity between homeland and colony is replaced here by a
focus on contrasting Cherokee life ways with the colonial cultures they encountered. Thorough
treatment of those colonial cultures is not possible while maintaining the centrality of Cherokee
folk ways, and in any case would only represent a recapitulation of Fischer’s work.
The following chapters examine the many different facets which made up Cherokee
culture during the colonial period, and aim to show how they composed a fascinating native
society and how their differences with colonial folk ways caused deteriorating relations leading
to massacres, wars, and ethnic removal. The organization of the chapters follows a three tiered
progression. Chapter one deals with the core beliefs of the Cherokee, the foundational tenets on
which the rest of their culture ways were built. This includes their ideas about the nature of the
universe, about rights and freedoms, wealth and greed, etc. Chapter two deals with the structural
13
elements of culture, the way that they organized their society based on the beliefs covered in the
first chapter. Good examples are their social/governmental system, kinship and family
relationships, and ranking habits. The final chapter covers the overt actions and products of
Cherokee culture, the immediately observable elements such as the houses and fortifications they
Basic Beliefs Foundational ideas about the world on which more complex facets of
culture are built.
Freedom Ideas about liberty and the validity or obligation of limiting it within the
community.
Power Beliefs about the proper derivation and use of power within the
community.
Religious Cosmological beliefs extending to the supernatural, and cultural
institutions of engaging with those supernatural powers.
Magic Less formalized beliefs about interacting with the supernatural, usually
employed outside of community institutions.
Gender Ideas about gender differences and the roles appropriate to the sexes.
Age Attitudes relating to children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly.
Primarily concerned with their proper roles and interaction.
Death Customs and attitudes relating to funerary rites and death.
Wealth Ideas about what constitutes wealth and how wealth is valued socially.
Structural Culture Cultural structures which shape a community and give it definition.
Social Organization Patterns of settlement, affiliation, and social interaction. How culture
forms towns and regional powers within the population group.
Family The structure of clan and household, how they function with each other
and within the larger community.
Marriage Ideas about courtship, matrimony, and divorce.
Sex Attitudes towards sexual acts, both inside and outside of marriage,
including community values about adultery.
Child Rearing Cultural attitudes about the nature of children and how they ought to be
best brought up within the community.
Naming Onomastic ways, including the significance of names as both labels and as
more dynamic signifiers.
Time Ideas about the seasons and the proper use of time.
Rank Ranking customs, including how rank is determined, what authority it
comes with, and how different ranks interact.
Visible Culture The immediately observable sensory details of culture, including
things seen, felt, heard, etc.
Speech Communication, both spoken and through gestures. Ideas about how to
communicate comelily, both locally and interculturally.
Order Methods of keeping order within society, ranging from incentives and
verbal censoring to the use of force.
Building Forms of architecture and building techniques, including homes, religious
edifices, and fortifications.
War Customs relating to warfare, including the decision to go to war,
preparation, accoutrements of war, and tactics.
Sport Recreational pursuits and their place in society.
Food Culture ways pertaining to attaining, cooking, and consuming food.
Includes methods of gleaning provision and customs relating to
hospitality.
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Chapter One
The Frog who would Swallow the Sun:
The Power of Basic Beliefs
The ancient Cherokees believed that when a solar eclipse occurred, it was the doing of a
great frog who had got the Sun in its mouth and was devouring it. They were afraid of this,
because if the frog was allowed to finish his meal it would be forever night and they would have
to live in darkness for the rest of their days. In order to save the Sun, they climbed as high as
they could and shouted ferociously at the frog, brandishing their weapons and firing arrows into
the air in an attempt to frighten it away. This courageous method proved so successful that they
never failed to shout with all their might and threaten the frog whenever it made an appearance.
Early in the eighteenth century a trader from the English colonies, Alexander Longe, settled
down in Cherokee country 1 and became a trusted friend of the tribe. When he was confronted
with the story about the great frog, he heartily laughed, and told them about the true nature of an
eclipse, that it was the brief alignment of the Moon between Sun and earth, not a giant
amphibian! Longe had developed a sterling reputation among the Cherokees, and so at the next
eclipse, they put his words to the test and abstained from their skyward cries. Sure enough, the
Sun reappeared all on its own. 2 Longe succeeded in convincing them that the great frog was not
trying to eat the Sun, but that was the extent of it. They no longer believed in the story, but not
because it was silly and unscientific, merely because they had seen that the frog did not need to
be frightened away for the Sun to survive. Their basic beliefs underlying the frog story, that the
world was filled with legendary cosmic creatures and opposing upper and lower worlds,
1
Exact locations are uncertain. Longe co-operated a trade post among the Yuchi Indians at Chestowe (on
the Middle Tennessee River), and was partially scalped in a conflict with some of them. In retaliation, he urged the
nearby Cherokees to raid the town, and thenceforth lived in exile among the Cherokees. For further detail, see
Stephen Warren, "Reconsidering Coalescence: Yuchi and Shawnee Survival Strategies in the Colonial Southeast," in
Yuchi Indian Histories before the Removal Era(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 168-169.
2
Alexander Longe, "A Small Postscript," in Southern Indian Studies, ed. David Corkran(1969), 36-38.
16
remained unchanged. They still believed that great frogs were out there; they had simply been
mistaken about the monsters’ eating habits. Deeply rooted beliefs about the world and how it
works form the bedrock of culture, and are vital to understanding a society.
This initial section pertains to just such basic foundational beliefs in the Cherokee
culture, factors such as their religion, ideas about personal freedoms and obligations, their level
of materialism, etc. These are the ideological categories which make up any society’s essential
character and are the underpinnings of its particular details. The wearing down of Anglo-
Cherokee relations occurred because of specific incidents and sentiments, at a more “surface
level,” so to speak. Examples would be such things as arguments with traders which erupted into
assault or murder; fears of the Cherokees harboring runaway slaves; or marital jealousies and
clerical disapprovals over fort garrisons’ dalliances with “loose squaws.” These made up the
prima facie reasons for growing animosity, but would not have existed in such sharp a quality
and quantity if it were not for the underlying chasm in foundational cultural values. It was these
quintessential folk ways which, more than anything, defined who the Cherokees were in the
eighteenth century and explain why their jural society was culturally incompatible with the
Virginians, Carolinians, and Georgians who settled and quickly expanded on their borders. The
following discussion delves into Cherokee beliefs and just why they conflicted so sharply with
Freedom Ways
In 1759 a number of Cherokee raiding parties, angry at certain colonial abuses, attacked
settlements in Virginia and Carolina and perpetrated a massacre on the Yadkin River and in the
settlement of Long Canes. This was not a national uprising of the Cherokee majority, but rather
17
an act of blood vengeance by a few towns and clan sections that had lost kin in earlier, smaller,
altercations. The colonial response from South Carolina was an ultimatum: turn over the
perpetrators of the killings to face English justice, or else face the prospect of colonial military
intervention. The most respected Cherokee beloved men, the peoples’ de facto leaders, would
have liked nothing better than to comply and restore the mutually beneficial deerskin trade and
peaceful exchange. What happened instead was that those responsible for the massacre elected
not to turn themselves over, and none of the rest of the Cherokee population moved to force them
to do so. The result was a disastrous war for the Cherokees, as the British army burned towns and
crops, forcing countless villagers into flight and starvation. Simple compliance with the
governor’s demands would have been the easier option, and the Cherokee refusal to do so
illustrates their almost fanatical dedication to the idea of individual autonomy and freedom. If the
guilty parties chose to do the right thing, all well and good, but if not, then the larger community
felt it would violate the ethos of individual liberty to use force in order to make them do it.
The Cherokee people lived in a state of personal freedom which bordered on individual
sovereignty. In a world where future revolutionaries such as George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson were still loyal subjects to a king, the Cherokees enjoyed personal liberties that
surpassed those which the future United States of America would wrest from the British, and
even those touted in “the free world” of modern day. John Haywood noted this remarkable
characteristic of their culture and wrote of them, “Their darling passion is liberty. To it they
sacrifice everything, and in the most unbounded liberty they indulge themselves through life.” 3
The fact that they were willing to plunge their tribe into war with their English allies on behalf of
reckless raiding parties indeed lends force to the assertion that they would “sacrifice everything,”
3
John Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee (Knoxville: Heiskell & Brown, 1823),
254.
18
and this propensity was quite frustrating to imperial powers used to dealing with humble and
submissive “lesser peoples.” George Milligen-Johnston observed the Cherokee way of life, and
was struck with the contrast between their level of constraint and that which he was used to,
reflecting, “Subjection is what they are unacquainted with in their own State, there being no such
Thing as coercive Power among them: Their Chiefs are such only in Virtue of their Credit, and
not their Power; there being, in all other Circumstances, a perfect Equality among them.” 4
This equality and freedom to do what one liked, at least up to the limit of blatant and
overt conflict, extended to both genders and even to acts deleterious to community efforts and
war goals. After war was declared and the British arrayed their forces against the Cherokees, the
war chief Willinawaw placed the English Fort Loudoun, which had been built deep in Cherokee
country, under siege. 5 In fact, the fate of the Loudoun garrison was one of the most powerful
bargaining chips the Cherokees held during the conflict. This description of some Cherokee
women’s exercise of their own individual wills by feeding the garrison in direct opposition to
their war chief neatly demonstrates how during the war, just as at its outset, the ideal of liberty
Many of the soldiers in the garrison of Fort Loudoun, having Indian wives, these
brought them a daily supply of provisions, though blocked up, in order to be
starved to a surrender, by their own countrymen; and they persisted in this,
notwithstanding the express orders of Willinawaw, who, sensible of the
retardment this occasioned, threatened death to those who would assist their
enemy; but they, laughing at his threats, boldly told him, they would succour their
husbands every day, and were sure, that, if he killed them, their relations would
make his death atone for theirs. Willinawaw was too sensible of this to put his
threats into execution, so that the garrison subsisted a long time on the provisions
brought to them in this manner. 6
4
George Milligen-Johnston, "A Short Description of the Province of South-Carolina," in Colonial South
Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions, ed. Robert Meriwether(Coluimbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1951), 185-186.
5
Fort Loudoun was built near the Towns of Chota and Tanasi in present day Monroe County, Tennessee.
The State name Tennessee itself is derived from the town name Tanasi.
6
Henry Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake (Cherokee: Museum of the Cherokee Indian
Press, 2007), 35.
19
These, of course, are all illustrations of the Cherokee cultural ideal. No people always
live up to their ideals, and there were instances where Cherokees guilty of offenses against the
English were turned over for punishment, such as during negotiations between Moytoy of Tellico
and Governor James Glen of South Carolina in 1751. 7 Such concessions were not made without
resistance however, and one gets the impression that they left a foul taste in the mouths of the
Cherokee headmen who made them. It should be kept in mind that the events around the Anglo-
Cherokee War were extraordinary; Cherokee life was not one filled with momentous dilemmas
between upholding liberty and facing ruin. This is because there was another facet to the
Cherokee ethos which overlaid and synergized with their ideology of freedom to produce a social
Fred Gearing analyzes the Cherokee propensity against face to face conflict and open
aggression. He sums up the prevailing method they used in avoiding such aggression in three
parts, “first, by asserting their interests cautiously; second, by turning away from impending
conflict; third, by withdrawing from men who openly clashed with their fellows.” 8 Jockeying for
one’s own gain and even against the aims of another was not uncommon, but it occurred in the
context of scheming, trickery, spells, or other methods of pushing an agenda without resorting to
overt variance. This too was a manifestation of the liberty principle, preferring withdrawal to the
use of coercive force, which would have constituted a violation of the opposing party’s freedom.
A particularly belligerent Cherokee would soon find himself collectively ostracized and most
likely change his ways from such covert social pressures. Just such an occurrence happened to
the Mankiller of Tellico in 1757 when he tried to agitate the people against the English and shift
7
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: May 21, 1750 - August 7, 1754, ed. William McDowell (Columbia:
South Carolina Archives Department, 1958), 189-196.
8
Fred Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century,"
American Anthropological Association 64, no. 5 (1962), 33.
20
their political alliance to the French, and met with such disapproval that the resulting jeers and
The colonial conceptions of freedom, soon to express themselves rather vividly in 1776,
were far more conservative in their sentiments. They constituted a tradition still based broadly
around freedom of the elites, not of every common individual, as traced by their heritage in such
documents as the coronation charter of Henry I and Magna Carta. Strong hierarchical boundaries
were an intrinsic part of the colonists’ cultural traditions, and the Cherokee concept of universal
freedom was an alien one, incompatible with their understanding of how the world operated.
Perhaps Captain Demere’s impression of the Cherokees, developed after serving as head of the
fort garrison among them for quite some time, best reflects the cultural gap between the two
peoples,
The Savages are an odd Kind of People; as there is no Law nor Subjection
amongst them, they can't be compelled to do any Thing nor oblige them to
embrace any Party except they please. The very lowest of them thinks himself as
great and as high as any of the Rest, every one of them must be courted for their
Friendship, with some Kind of a Feeling, and made much of. So what is called
great and leading Men amongst them, are commonly old and middle-aged People,
who know how to give a Talk in Favour of whom they have a Fancy for, and that
same may influence the Minds of the young Fellows for a Time, but every one is
his own Master. 10
Power Ways
Cherokee attitudes towards authority and power flowed naturally from their ideas about
freedom. Demere’s comment above neatly blends the two, and the emphasis of persuasion in
their leading men highlights the communal and consent based character of their political
9
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: 1754-1765, ed. William Mcdowell (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1970), 359.
10
Ibid., 393.
21
hierarchy and delegated power was virtually (although not altogether) unknown. In their town
and national councils, every single member had a place, should they elect to participate, and each
voice was equal. It is important not to imagine this equality as a native brand of relativism or
political correctness; each person’s opinion was equal in its potential and opportunity to
contribute. Opinions were unlikely to gain much support unless they were of great merit or were
made appealing by persuasive oratory skill. The absence of hierarchical concerns in political
voice extended to gender as well; unlike colonial institutions, Cherokee women were full
participants in the council process. While at a diplomatic conference in Charles Town, the
Cherokee headman Little Carpenter remarked upon the absence of women in the councils of
Carolinian politics. He pointedly noted to Governor Lyttleton that “White men as well as Red
were born of women” and inquired as to why their women were not admitted to the discussions.
Lyttleton was taken aback, and only responded a few days later that they “Do place a confidence
in their Women and share their councils with them when they know their Hearts to be good.” 11
This equal participation should not be mistaken for a democracy. Nothing so concrete as
a record of voting or any such democratic process has come down to us through history, and the
Cherokee system certainly cannot be seen as anything close to a tyranny of the majority.
Consensus was the goal, and the ideal was to achieve unanimity. Because human nature rarely
allows that happy occurrence, Cherokee power ways called for the same conflict avoiding
behaviors as reflected in their freedom ways. If a minority could not be persuaded to consent to
the majority position, their natural recourse was to remove themselves entirely. Certainly the
majority would not use coercion to force them into compliance. At the core of this reality lies the
true character of the Cherokee ideology of power: unconstrained consent. Anyone who did not
11
Minutes of Feb. 9-12, 1757, S.C. Council Journal, quoted in John Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive
Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 69.
22
approve of the consensus decision was absolutely free to depart or otherwise remain completely
Thus, the key to power in Cherokee society lay in the persuasive arts. Lieutenant
Timberlake described it this way, speaking particularly of their war parties, “there is no law or
compulsion on those that refuse to follow, or punishment to those that forsake their chief: he
strives, therefore, to inspire them with a sort of enthusiasm, by the war song, as the ancient bards
once did in Britain.” 12 Thus, leaders did rise to the surface. Men with the gift of inspiring speech
and plainly wise judgment such as Moytoy, Old Hop, and Little Carpenter became community
leaders by virtue of the sway they held over hearts and minds. It was a delicate leadership
though, never to be taken for granted or deemed held by right. During the Anglo-Cherokee War,
for instance, Little Carpenter found himself out of favor because of his steadfast support for the
English over the French. He acted in accordance with Cherokee principles and removed himself
from the equation, departing with some warriors still in agreement with him to raid the French. 13
After two disastrous British campaigns devastated the Cherokee towns, however, his advice to
make nice with them overcame angry sentiments and he again assumed a position of leadership.
Naturally full and equal participation in the governing structures of the community was
far more attainable on a local than national level. The Cherokee town regularly held councils in
each settlement, and they were attended by all. With the advent of the English, the beginning of
centralization, and the need for larger scale diplomatic machinery, there emerged the political
body of the national council. It only convened when absolutely needed, but it was essentially a
town council model enacted on a large scale. Every Cherokee was free to take part, though
obviously actual attendance was limited to those either greatly motivated or easily able to appear.
12
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 36.
13
John Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 1756-63 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2001), 88.
23
Though this was not properly a body of representatives, it operated much in that regard. The one
unique officer, the Speaker, was representative, and his task was to speak to the English for the
whole council. As such, he was severely restricted in what he could say on their behalf. Nothing
could be communicated except what was approved by the decision of the Cherokee community
in council. When Skiagunta of Keowee 14 spoke to South Carolina’s Governor Glen in this
capacity, and wanted to discuss a matter of personal interest, he waited until the official matter
was finished and very clearly indicated that what he said after was on his own behalf and not
The Cherokees and colonists eyed each others’ power folk ways with equal distaste.
English governors found it frustrating and inelegant to have to deal with a whole community of
equals rather than with a king or chief who could speak with absolute authority for the whole
nation. This sentiment was especially clear in these intergovernmental exchanges, but ideas
behind the social differences went beyond mere frustration at its being cumbersome for
executing diplomatic tasks. There was a further, culturally biased, sentiment that it was wrong
for power to be so equally distributed. Aristocracies, both social and religious, were deeply
ingrained parts of the English ethos, and the idea of a society that operated without them was
somehow repulsive. Common Indians fancying themselves free of hierarchical authority irritated
the British upper crust, resulting eventually in the long term goal of “reducing the Indians to
civility.” 16
Those Indians, for their part, thought the distribution of power they observed among the
colonists ridiculous and unfair. Seeing military leaders who purchased their commissions by
14
Keowee was a Cherokee town situated in present day Oconee County, South Carolina, and gives its name
to the nearby Keowee River.
15
Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation, 60-61.
16
For more on this idea of ‘reducing’ the Indian to civility see James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers : The
Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 48.
24
wealth or by prestigious parentage, they scoffed at the practice, finding such men unfit and
contemptible. James Adair 17 recorded their opinion of such officers in a telling passage,
They reckon if our warriors had gained high titles by personal bravery, they
would be at least in the shape of men, if not of active brisk warriors; for constant
manly exercise keeps a due temperament of body, and a just proportion of shape.
They said, some were not fit even for the service of an old woman, much less for
the difficult and lively exercises which manly warriors pursue in their rough
element -- that they could never have gone to war, but bought their beloved, broad
paper with yellow stone, or it must have passed from father to son, like the rest of
their possessions; and that by their intemperate method of eating and drinking
without proper exercise, they had transformed themselves into those over-grown
shapes, which our weavers, taylors, and plaiters of false hair, rendered more
contemptible. 18
Concerning the high handed way that the aristocrats treated the common people, the Indians
berated them for their imperious attitudes and for speaking sharply to them and frowning, and
forcing them to stand at a distance with their hats in hand “as if they were black people,” rather
than being inspiring and cheerful. Adair’s informants summed up by turning the plantation
racism back on their white neighbors, saying, “Such conduct, always a sure token of cowardice,
testified with convincing clearness, they were unable to act the part of even an honest black
man.” 19
Such strong opinions on both sides tended to form a continuum of negative sentiment,
wherein focus on the poor qualities of the other culture drowned out admiration of the good.
Where the power values espoused by Cherokees and colonists conflicted it created tension and ill
will, while areas which did not conflict were only a net neutral. Non-conflicting cultural ways
therefore did not make the problem any worse, but they also did not mitigate the effects of those
which did conflict. The result was a slow but steady downward spiral in Anglo-Cherokee
17
James Adair was an English Indian trader who lived and worked among the Southeastern Indian tribes
for many years. Unlike the majority of those in his profession, Adair carefully observed the Indians, and recorded
what he saw with great detail. The ethnological information he provides is wide ranging and important to any study
of the Cherokees and surrounding Indian tribes.
18
James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London: E. & C. Dilly, 1775), 433.
19
Ibid., 434.
25
relations as the native ethos of individual freedom chaffed against colonial hierarchism. This was
one of the cornerstones on which the tragedy of the Trail of Tears would be built.
Religious Ways
One factor with the potential to alleviate the growing animosity was religion, particularly
its capability to draw people together and foster brotherly love. Here too, however,
incompatibilities in beliefs created problems instead of fixing them. Cherokee religious ideas
derived from the material world around them and their attempts to categorize and understand it.
This, of course, is true of most basic religious ideas, but it is important to keep in mind with
Cherokee beliefs because the way their religious elements worked together represented a logical
system through which they could order their world, and the context of their basic beliefs explains
the reasoning behind otherwise arbitrary seeming ceremonies and superstitions. The system itself
was widespread, representing the beliefs of Indians all across the Southeast. Some particularities
must have existed between tribes, but many of the distinctions are unknown. Sadly, historical
documentation of the religion is good enough to get a general outline, but not to discern many of
Cherokee religion had myths of creation and origins, but they did not necessarily form
the basis of the religion; rather, the religious elements came from the natural world the
Cherokees observed and out of those elements they formed a mythopoetic corpus of creation
stories and ideas of the world’s structure. The most basic tenet of the belief system was that there
were a small number of categories to which everything belonged, and that the mixing of
categories constituted pollution which caused chaos and misfortune. At the heart of these ideas
26
was an ideology of animism, that each object or animal had a spirit which could bless or curse
One major axis of categorization was that of The Upper World and the Underworld, with
our own realm making for a threefold division. Animals tended to be associated with these
realms, birds with the upper, four footed animals like deer with the middle, and fish, snakes, and
perhaps insects with the Underworld. The sun was of the Upper World as well, and so was fire.
Water, bubbling up from underground springs, was of the Underworld. Since Cherokees
considered it extremely dangerous and taboo to mix categories, and especially directly opposing
categories, they would never put out a sacred fire by pouring water onto it. 21 Both the sun and
the river, called respectively “the Apportioner” and “the Long Man” were major deities. That
they were opposites did not make one good and the other bad; they were just different, and
Cherokees called upon them for different reasons. James Mooney concluded, after exhaustive
research with Cherokee shamanic manuscripts, “The sun is invoked chiefly by the ball-player,
while the hunter prays to the fire; but every important ceremony… contains a prayer to the
“Long Person,” the formulistic name for water… The wind, the storm, the cloud, and the frost
are also invoked in different formulas.” 22 Another important dichotomy was that between male
and female. For this reason it was important for Cherokees to be cautious in their dealings with
the opposite sex. Men and women became polluted or unclean from engaging in intercourse, and
even a husband and wife had to be purified by plunging in a stream to clear themselves from the
20
James Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," in 7th Annual Report(Washington: Bureau of
American Ethnology, 1891), 319-322.
21
Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knocksville: The university of Tennessee Press, 1976) 128;
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 406.
22
Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," 340-341.
23
John Payne and Daniel Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010), 64.
27
The number four was important in Cherokee religious ideas, and was tied to yet another
layer of categorizations represented by the four cardinal directions. These four directions had
accompanying colors and powers, wielded by their animating spirits called the four winds. The
north wind was a black god, bringing cold and death. The east was red and reigned over triumph,
power, and success. The south was white and represented peace and good weather. The west was
possibly brown 24 and helped with bringing rains in the growing season. Variations on this theme
certainly existed, and different colors and powers were associated with different directions in
iterations from different sources. The scheme here comes from Longe’s conversation with a
Cherokee priest. Mooney has a slightly different organization deriving from his sources. Most
likely the decentralized nature of the Cherokee tribe allowed for many flavors of their religion
Naturally the Cherokees encountered things which seemed to exist simultaneously in two
or more of their cosmic categories. These represented anomalies, and the Indians considered
them particularly powerful and dangerous agents within their world. The bear, for example, was
an animal that crossed over into the realm of humans by standing on its hind legs. The Cherokees
devised a whole myth about the origin of bears from a group of Indians who decided to leave
their village behind and live like animals in the woods. 26 Bats and flying squirrels bridged the
gap between the four footed animals and birds, and the Venus flytrap was a strange “plant-
animal.” Such anomalies tended to feature prominently in Cherokee myths. 27 They were
powerful, and could be exploited to great effect if used properly, but one had to always exercise
caution when dealing with them because their effects were so strong and often volatile. The
24
Longe’s informant called it “the color of the Spaniards.”
25
Longe, "A Small Postscript,", 12-14; Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," 342.
26
James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 326.
27
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 139.
28
Cherokees even fabricated new anomalous creatures such as the terrible Uktena, an enormous
serpent with the antlers of a buck and a brilliant crystal set between its eyes with which it could
stun or beguile anyone foolish enough to gaze upon it. This was not a mere story to the
Cherokees, but something they firmly believed in. They “knew” exactly where the Uktena lived,
Categorizing and managing the many different people, objects, and experiences in a
Cherokee’s life, even accounting for anomalies, may seem simple but the ceremonies and
formulas to properly utilize them to one’s benefit were considered vast and complex. These were
the domain of the priests, who jealously guarded their secret knowledge. Such power gave them
high status in the community so that the priests were often chiefs or other powerful beloved men.
This is not to say that they were charlatans; certainly they believed in what they did as much as
the rest of the people in their towns. Training for the priesthood was rigorous in several ways.
For one, priests adhered to more stringent taboos in order to avoid pollution than other
Cherokees, and in addition priestly acolytes also had to master the lore, medicine, divining
rituals, and chants which made up Cherokee priestcraft. This required a sharp memory,
In keeping with the Cherokee social ethos of non-hierarchy, the priesthood may not have
properly made up a social class. One historian believes that pretty much all males received some
training in how to manipulate the spirits and elements to influence the world around them.
According to Fred Gearing the role of full priest had to do with extent of training, and was
further subdivided into specializations. 30 Thus, most grown men could act as a priest in some
capacity, but those who received more exhaustive training and/or demonstrated exceptional skill
28
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 237-238.
29
Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," 309-310.
30
Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century," 114.
29
would be characterized by their “priestliness” to a greater extent. Butrick, however, reported that
only specially chosen persons were inducted into the mysteries of the priesthood, and James
Mooney encountered much the same thing in his fieldwork among the Cherokees during the
early twentieth century. 31 There is some evidence for an ancient hereditary priesthood among the
Cherokee, the Ani Kutani or “Physic family.” 32 They were said to have been greatly feared and
to have become tyrannical, especially in using their power to steal desirable wives from other
Cherokee husbands. According to several sources a young brave, finding his wife forcibly
violated by the priest, rallied the people and led them in a mass slaughter which entirely
destroyed the sect. 33 Longe’s reference to them, from the early eighteenth century, reads as
though it was before this destruction, discussing the Physic family as the current priesthood of
the Cherokees. Other evidence for their existence at this time is, however, not forthcoming, and
accounts of their destruction seem to predate European contact. The paucity of further
contemporary information would thus point to an earlier date. 34 In any case, if the story is true it
may indicate that the religious system of the eighteenth century Cherokees was an improvisation
Whether or not that is true, the priests of the Cherokee religion who were serving during
the eighteenth century officiated in a number of important ceremonies, from the personal to those
involving the whole community. On the personal level, a man suspecting his wife of infidelity
might seek out a priest for divination on the matter, and the priest would likewise officiate at the
cleansing and naming ceremony for a newborn baby. During times of war, the priest used a
31
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 33; Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the
Cherokees," 310.
32
John Payne and Daniel Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010), 16-17.
33
Dr. J. D. MacGowan, "Indian Secret Societies," Historical Magazine 10, no. 1 (1866) 139-140;
Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, 249.
34
Longe, "A Small Postscript," 10.
30
divining crystal and sacrificial meat to determine if victory or defeat would result from an attack.
Over the course of the year, priests performed the sacred duties at the center of six major
Cherokee festivals. According to Butrick, these six annual events had since eroded and
consolidated into one main feast, the Green Corn Dance. 35 This was a harvest and renewal
ceremony, attended by a purifying fast and then subsequent feast. With great solemnity the
priests ordered the people to extinguish all their fires throughout the town, and then re-kindled a
new sacred fire to burn in the center of the town house. This was the apex of the year, and
together with other dances and feasts it tied the ceremonial Cherokee religion to their everyday
lives in the ebb and flow of the seasons. 36 Priest and ceremony thus were deeply entrenched
features of Cherokee life and culture, far more so than their colonial neighbors realized.
Colonial reaction to Cherokee religion, in fact, was largely to ignore it. While most
colonies technically held to a policy of converting the Indians to Christianity, most were far too
focused on developing their own economies and cultural hearths to bother about the tedious
errand of marching into the hills to spread the divine knowledge to the idle savages. One
observer in the mid eighteenth century noted this, lamenting “To the shame of the Christian
name, no pains have ever been taken to convert them to Christianity; on the contrary, their
morals are perverted and corrupted by the sad example they daily have of its depraved professors
residing in their towns.” 37 Where the white man did take note of native religion, he often
misunderstood it entirely. Oftentimes the significant ministrations of the priests were hand
waved away as “mummeries,” and the Indians said to be nearly irreligious, being too ignorant
even to hold to pagan doctrines. Other observers, such as Adair and Butrick, interpreted the
Indian ceremonies as vestigial Jewish rites, believing the natives to be the lost ten tribes of Israel.
35
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 34.
36
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 105-107.
37
Quoted in Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 38.
31
This was what Charles Hudson called “a happy choice,” because they viewed such a heritage in a
positive light and thus paid better attention to what might otherwise have been ignored as
meaningless. 38
Cherokee response to the few colonial missionaries they saw were not exactly
encouraging. Timberlake relates the disappointing result achieved by one English preacher in
Cherokee country,
Mr. Martin, who having preached Scripture till both he and his audience were
heartily tired, was told at last that they knew very well that if they were good they
would go up; if bad, down; that he could tell no more; that he had long plagued
them with what they no ways understood, and they desired that he would depart
the country. 39
Such resistance to easy conversion certainly did not endear the Cherokees to the colonial
population, serving to keep the gulf between Anglo-American and Cherokee cultures as wide as
ever. After the failure of the Chickamauga settlements to push the frontiersmen out of Indian
country, and the Cherokees settled on the strategy of Westernizing in order to repair relations,
missionary activity increased and fell on more receptive ears. Even under these conditions
though, missionaries were distressed to find that their new converts did not always perfectly
conform to the Christian mold. Indian religion was highly inclusive, making it prone to
missionaries in the short term, but proved to be disappointing when the Christian God resided
alongside rather than wholly replaced the spirits of native religion. Churches and priest-conjurers
38
Charles Hudson, "James Adair as an Anthropologist," Ethnohistory 24, no. 4 (1977), 313-314.
39
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 34.
40
Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998), 182-183.
32
As late as 1888, when James Mooney was working with the Cherokees on the North
Carolina reservation, he found sacred papers belonging to Inâ´lĭ, a recently deceased old
Cherokee who served as both native conjurer as well as an ordained Methodist preacher. 41 Such
syncretism seemed to Cherokee minds perfectly suited to bringing the two cultures together, but
in retrospect was somewhat unmindful of their new neighbors’ religious heritage of severely
divisive. Cherokees were inclusive and flexible in the details, but retained a solid core in their
cosmological worldview. Europeans, on the other hand, tended to niggle over the minutest of
theological features such as Sabbath laws or notions about the sacraments. 42 Under such
circumstances inevitable Cherokee syncretism was certain to spark tensions, let alone reactions
to outright rejection of the Christian faith, such as Timberlake encountered. The effects of
divergent religious beliefs take a central role in the unfolding story of Anglo-Cherokee cultural
contention.
Magic Ways
Because the Cherokee worldview was intrinsically animistic many of the beliefs and
behaviors were in the orbit of magic and superstition while not exactly of a religious nature. The
priesthood, with all its rites and divinations dealt directly with the spirits in the big picture, but in
a world where spirits or witches could be around every corner it was hardly convenient for a
typical Cherokee to have a priest always on hand for metaphysical recourse. On the periphery of
41
Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," 315-316.
42
This applies to numerous European Christian traditions, from Catholic expressions of intolerance like the
Spanish Inquisition to Protestant inflexibilities as demonstrated in incidents such as the New England affairs of
Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Cherokees dealt mainly with Anglicans and other Protestant sects.
33
the overtly religious life of the Cherokees, then, lay the fears, wards, and charms employed to
deter harm and guarantee success which anyone had at his or her disposal.
formula undertaken directly after childbirth. After a child was born, the Cherokees believed that
the father could control when the couple’s next offspring would be conceived by undertaking the
following ritual. He would wrap up the placenta from the birth and embark on a journey over the
mountain ridges. The number of ridges he travelled would indicate the number of years until he
was blessed with another child. Once he made his destination, the man buried the bundle around
a foot in the ground while whispering an incantation. The entire episode was done in secret,
because if an enemy should stealthily follow him, a counter to the ritual could be done to harm
his family. The enemy could rebury the bundle an arm’s length deep and cover it with rocks,
ensuring that the man would never again have children; or he could discard the placenta in the
open, making it so that the father and his wife would lose any control over the process and have
more children at random and probably inopportune times. 43 Magic ways inculcated this sort of
secret and suspicious behavior, and its opposite, a nosey prying into the business of their
neighbors. 44
Dreams and omens were supposed to have great significance. If a Cherokee could learn
the different meanings of types of dreams or incidental signs, he would be better prepared to
dreaming about bread or fruit, for example, was sure to proceed his successfully killing a deer,
while dreaming of a broken gun meant that he would catch nothing in the coming winter.
Dreaming of a snake presaged sickness, and to dream of someone traveling west was a sure sign
43
Frans Olbrechts, "Cherokee Belief and Practice with Regard to Childbirth," Anthropos 26, (1931), 28-29.
44
Adair, The History of the American Indians, vi.
34
that they would soon die. Similarly, startling a fox at the start of a journey was bad, and meant a
family member would soon pass, while a bird flying into a house was a sign of visitors in the
near future. If an owl perched on trees within the town, particularly peach trees, and sang it
Witchcraft, in fact, played a big part in Cherokee superstition and magic folk ways.
Lacking any other meaningful cause or purpose, they often attributed random tragedy to witches
living in or around the community. The Cherokee word for the long-eared owl was the same as
for “witch,’ and man killing witches were said to be able to appear as animals and to favor the
form of an owl. 46 The owl had particular significance as it was one of the more anomalous
creatures the Cherokees encountered. It was a bird, yet was strangely nocturnal and resembled a
wizened old man. One such witch from Cherokee myth was the Spear-Finger, a dreadful old
woman who could appear in any form, had skin hard as rock that could not be harmed by
weapons, and a deadly piercing finger used to kill. She would impersonate family members, and
strike when one was at ease or asleep, stealing human livers for her food. Another class of
dreaded witches was the Raven-Mockers, who visited the bedsides of sick persons and stole their
The Cherokees thus feared witches greatly, and devised a number of methods to ward
them off or combat their deadly attentions. Tobacco smoke was said to be effective, as it would
eventually cause a witch to sneeze and depart; for this reason a house sheltering a recuperating
person would often be filled with smoke against the possibility of Raven-Mockers or the like. A
kind of ash made by burning a particular species of small mouse was rumored to allow one to
perceive invisible or disguised witches when rubbed on the eyes, seven days after which the
45
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 102-104.
46
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 141, 175-776.
47
Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 316-319, 401-403.
35
discovered interloper would die. 48 Another ward was to attach the feather of a buzzard over the
doorway of a house. The buzzard was considered to be immune to any sickness or witchcraft, as
evidenced by its feeding continually on dead carcasses and thriving on the diet rather than falling
ill. As such, its feathers were said to have protective properties such as stopping witch attacks
and even watching over a home to keep things from being lost or stolen. 49
Witches were said to be the result of purposeful creation rather than a natural occurrence.
The mother of a new born infant (or infants, it was rumored that witches were typically made
when twins were born) was to abstain from feeding them milk for the first twenty-four days,
which was a period during which the mother generally kept secluded as she was ‘unclean” from
childbirth. Instead of milk, if she fed the infants a liquid hominy concoction, then they would
become witches with the power to know what you were thinking and to make things happen
through the power of thought alone. Olbrechts tells the story of a Cherokee priest who thwarted
an attempt at making witches in this manner by secretly feeding them food prepared by a
menstruating woman. Such fare was always considered unclean, so the remedy was considered
to have ruined the attempt at witch-making. 50 Most likely no one ever actually attempted so
heinous an act as attempting to purposefully create one of the feared witches, but at the core of
the belief in witches is a certain level of irrational suspicion, fueling the occasional accusation.
Witchcraft and magic ways were not foreign concepts to the Cherokees’ colonial
neighbors. Many different superstitions and witch traditions abounded in the various forms of
Christianity brought over the ocean from Europe. Where the two peoples would have agreed on
the need to guard against witches or even perhaps the significance of signs and wonders, the
48
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 240-241.
49
Wahnenauhi, "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," in Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, ed. Jack
Kilpatrick and Anna Kilpatrick(Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 187.
50
Olbrechts, "Cherokee Belief and Practice with Regard to Childbirth," 31-33.
36
deeper assumptions about the source of these things were entirely different. For the Cherokees,
omens and dreams were the work of unseen spirits of different sorts, which naturally sprang from
the plants, animals, and even the stones around them. Christians, on the other hand, interpreted
such signs as either divine insight from God or as the deceptions of demons. In the same way,
witches were the Cherokee human counterpart to the Uktena; they were anomalies who only
partly lived in the human realm. They were dangerous and troublesome, but not evil in the same
way Christians viewed witches who were persons “in league with the devil.”
Gender Ways
Often enough in history writing the analysis of gender devolves simply into “women’s
history,” but in the case of Cherokee culture it must reach broader horizons and explain the
differences they perceived in the two sexes. Certainly both were accorded equal autonomy, as is
clear from their ideologies of power and freedom, but their religious ideals also dictated that the
two were of differing categories and thus had to play different roles. Despite European shock at
the level of independence the Cherokee women held, their society preferred strong, culturally
dictated gender roles. They were not the same roles found in European culture, but they were
certainly distinct. There was not an equalist notion that “men can do anything women can do,” or
vice versa.
One of the most defining of Cherokee gender role divisions had to do with provisioning.
Men provided for the community by hunting game, and women by tending to crops. This is a
distinction which was deeply imbedded in the culture, and manifested in a number of different
places. The seminal Cherokee myth of Kana'ti and Selu demonstrates the fundamental ideas on
which these roles were based. Kana'ti and Selu (whose names mean exactly what they represent,
37
“the lucky hunter” and “corn”) were a husband and wife with two mischievous sons. Selu always
brought out corn and beans from her storehouse for supper, and Kana'ti went out every day and
brought back game. The core of the story involved the two boys trying to solve the mystery of
where their father got his game, and where their mother got her corn. They found that Kana'ti
kept the animals penned up in a cave, and let them out one at a time to hunt them. The boys
opened the cave and accidentally let them all free, thus making hunting a much harder task.
Likewise, they found that Selu produced her agricultural goods magically from her body, and
taking her for a witch they decided to kill her. She instructed them to drag her body seven times
in the ground once she was dead, and they would always have corn. They did this, but only twice
instead of seven times, and thus corn only grew sparsely instead of everywhere. The entire myth
is very similar to parallel legends of paradise lost, such as Pandora’s Box, but of particular
interest are the gendered lines drawn which established lasting boundaries in Cherokee culture. 51
The game/corn division of labor was reflected in many of the Cherokees’ rituals, such as
symbolic wedding offerings of meat and corn to each other representing what they would bring
to the union, or seasonal festival dances associated with the hunt and with the harvest. These,
discussed in the next chapter, demonstrate structural forms built upon the basic gender ideas
spelled out here. As in all cultures, Cherokee gender roles likely developed out of necessity and
natural aptitude dictated by biological gender distinctions. The hunt was naturally suited to the
physical capabilities of Cherokee men, and the time it required that they spend away from the
town made cultivating the fields a task to be taken up by the women out of necessity and
convenience. The task of actually clearing the fields, which required a greater measure of
strength, was one in which the men joined in. Similarly, the major undertaking of planting the
51
Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 242-245.
38
first crop of the season was large enough that the whole community, men and women,
participated equally. 52
Marriages were matrilocal, that is, the husband moved into the home of his wife, and it
belonged to her. Again, this was a natural occurrence due to the fact that the masculine
occupation of hunting (and later trading as well) meant that he spent the bulk of his time away,
and so the home was a female space simply because women were overwhelmingly the ones who
were there. As a man grew older he was likely to hunt less and be in town more of the time, but
the trend was for men to congregate at the town house rather than spend time at their wives’
homes. Even younger men who were not abroad were often known to spend but few hours of the
night in their wives’ houses. 53 As with clearing fields, however, building houses was a labor
intensive task which required masculine assistance and fell under the purview of the whole
community. 54 Such a practice was alien to the European patrilocal tradition, and meant that
women “owned” their homes 55 (and, of course, the associated farmland) to a greater degree than
Going on the warpath was a gendered activity, so much so that the warriors practiced full
separation from female contact for a period prior to going out. This was another Cherokee
religious ideal of not mixing unlike categories; war was a masculine undertaking, and to pollute a
warrior with female contact was thought to spell disaster. 56 As with the hunt, the basis of
thinking war to be masculine in nature derived from physical strength. In the rare instance of a
woman courageously taking part in war, such as defensively when the town came under attack,
52
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 406-407.
53
Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835, 45.
54
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 417.
55
Note that Cherokee notions of land ownership wee far less legalistic or permanent than their European
counterparts. Distinctions between who owned what land were much more of a serious affair to Europeans than they
were to Cherokees.
56
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 23.
39
she was accorded a particularly honored status as “war woman,” and thereafter took the lead in
While the actual business of war was men’s work, the instigation of warfare was often at
the behest of women. Native war was usually retaliatory, and because women bore children they
were thought to be more deeply wounded by the loss of their offspring in battle than the fathers.
Thus it was frequently a woman who urged the warriors to go out against some enemy who had
taken one of her children and revenge them. This same rationale held true for the prominent role
of women in torturing and killing captives taken in battle; since they were the ones most deeply
hurt by the initial loss, they took out their sorrow and rage on the enemy captives. 58
Priestcraft was an exclusively masculine role. Priests were described as men by all
observers without any explanation as to why. There is one possible rationale, however, which
presents itself. Priests served as the go-to leaders and authorities in the community. These
characteristics seem to have been masculine traits in Cherokee culture, so that even in their
matrilineal clan structure the task of disciplining children fell not to the mother but to her
brother. Overall, the Cherokee system was egalitarian with patriarchal tendencies. This did not
mean that women were excluded from important religious experiences; indeed, because gender
positions was essential. During religious dances the women performed crucial roles, acting as
counterparts to the men. Because of the belief that male and female were intrinsically different in
nature, neither could fill the part of the other in important ceremonies. 59
warmaking ways, would have reinforced the division of roles as women associated largely with
57
Wahnenauhi, "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," 185.
58
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 391; Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 363.
59
Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835, 36-37.
40
women, and men with men, so that gendered responsibilities and skills were perpetuated.
Hunting, agriculture, and war are only convenient examples of the gendered nature that attached
itself to many and sundry tasks and behaviors in Cherokee society. Men, for example, were the
chief craftsmen of their structures, canoes, weapons and ceremonial pipes, while women made
Cherokee gender roles may have been distinct from each other, but they were not
sufficiently identical to colonial ways to earn the approbation of their neighbors from across the
ocean. The Cherokee ethos of gender was one of balance and division of responsibility; men
provided for the community in areas where they were strong, and women did the same. Those
areas were complimentary, and so there was a balance of mutual support. Euro-American gender
ways tended more towards hierarchy than balance, and even though the Cherokee leadership was
headed by their beloved men, there was a lack of strong gendered authoritarianism which made
colonial elites apprehensive. This was not a distinct cultural dissonance, it was simply another
Age Ways
How a society acts in regard to the aged among them usually correlates to how well they
esteem the characteristics usually associated with age, such as wisdom and experience. Even in
communities which exalt the physical above the mental, the elderly are often venerated as those
who have succeeded at life and triumphed over the hardships which ended the lives of those who
did not survive. For the Cherokees, age represented a state of refinement. They held that there
was an ideal character to which a man or woman ought to aspire, and deemed the older
generations among them to have drawn closer than others to that goal. Thus, the Cherokees
60
William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram (New York: Facsimile Library, 1940), 401.
41
looked up to the elderly in their society, and they often held positions of influence due to their
perceived wisdom and judgment. This was not an instant transformation, but a lifelong
aspiration. Once, when confronted with insulting news, Dragging Canoe responded, “I suppose I
am looked upon as a boy, and not a warrior.” 61 Though he was yet a young man, he expected a
measure of respect in accordance with his middle status of warrior, between boy and beloved
man.
At around fifty-five, Cherokee men were usually of an age to stop going on war parties,
and they graduated to the status of “beloved man.” These beloved men were predominantly the
ones who the community looked to for guidance and leadership. In their town councils, the
beloved men made up a singular group of moderators and directors, headed by the chief priest
and his attendants. Even out of council, the beloved men were often available to give advice or
mediate. Butrick describes them as congregating generally near the central town house of the
settlements, “there were certain elders, or old men residing at or near the council house, whose
influence and authority were considerable, especially among boys and young people.” 62
In council, the beloved men were accorded a certain deference by the younger community
members, and they deliberated separately when inter-clan conflicts of interest demanded the
Women also gained status as they aged, though they played different roles than the
beloved men. Each of the seven clans selected one of its beloved women to join with the beloved
men in a sacred dance at their religious festivals, officiated over by the chief priest. 64 The
beloved women seem to have been looked up to as guardians of Cherokee moral behavior,
61
John Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their
Removal to the West, 1838 (Kingsport: Southern Publishers, 1938), 168.
62
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 35.
63
Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century," 41.
64
Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, 235.
42
keeping a watchful eye lest the indiscretions of the more youthful tribe members should cause
religious impurity and harm the town as a whole. Adair recorded the instance of a drought, upon
which the priest divined that the cause was their “going to the women in their religious
retirements,” (i.e. during menstruation). The reaction of the older women was to take up an
instantly disapproving and vigilant posture. In Adair’s words, “The old women, as they go along,
will exclaim loudly against the young people, and protest they will watch their manners very
narrowly for the time to come, as they are sure of their own steady virtue.” 65 Some years later,
William Bartram and his companion encountered first hand this role of the beloved women
when, after weeks of travel, he encountered a group of fetching young Cherokee women picking
Now, although we meant no other than an innocent frolic with this gay assembly
of hamadryades, we shall leave it to the person of feeling and sensibility to form
an idea to what lengths our passions might have hurried us, thus warmed and
excited, had it not been for the vigilance and care of some envious matrons who
lay in ambush, and espying us gave the alarm, time enough for the nymphs to
rally and assemble together. 66
During the Revolutionary era, Dragging Canoe and the majority of young Cherokee
warriors defied the leadership of the beloved men and chose the path of war against the white
colonists rather than appeasement. Dragging Canoe founded the Chickamauga town group, and
from there he and his followers began a drawn out campaign of raiding to push away
encroaching settlers. It is tempting to see this as a subversion of the normative Cherokee age folk
way, but in reality it was more nuanced than that. Because the respect given to elders was based
on an expectation of accumulated wisdom and virtue, the tradition was not arbitrary but rather a
form of loose meritocracy. The Chickamaugan “secession” was based on the fact that its
members thought the current group of elders had failed in demonstrating wisdom, and followed
65
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 85.
66
Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, 289.
43
what they saw as a better path. Dragging Canoe himself remained leader into old age, and
throughout the Chickamaugas continued to respect the aged, participating in a limited fashion
even with the towns they had left and their national council. 67
Death Ways
Age, however honored, eventually gives way to death. The way in which a culture
handles imminent death by age or sickness, and the following inevitable funerary rituals, reflects
the peoples’ beliefs about what comes, or does not come, after this life. In the case of the
Cherokees, they believed that death was to be faced without fear and without flinching. This was
especially true of their warriors, and was an important part of the virtue of courage in the face of
peril. This was a martial characteristic shared by the whole of the Southeast Indian tribal group,
and often found opportunity for expression in the frequent torture of war prisoners. One observer
described it as, “an indifference to life or death, pleasure or pain… and their dying behaviour did
not reflect the least dishonour on their former gallant actions. All the pangs of fiery torture
served only to refine their manly spirits.” 68 If an aged father believed he was nearing his end, he
would commonly call his children to him in order to prepare them, and to pass on his sage advice
and any ancient customs he thought they needed to know. His relatives would stay with him until
his end, never letting their countenances be downcast lest they speed him too quickly on his
way. 69
One prominent Cherokee scholar has interpreted their religion as being entirely
concerned with the present, devoid of any afterlife: “[the Cherokee] had no Great Spirit, no
67
Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their
Removal to the West, 1838, 330-332.
68
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 385.
69
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 184; Longe, "A Small Postscript," 26.
44
happy hunting ground, no heaven, no hell, and consequently death had for him no terrors and he
awaited the inevitable end with no anxiety as to the future.” 70 A Cherokee priest in the early
eighteenth century, however, told Alexander Longe quite a different story when asked where he
thought the soul went after death. According to the priest, four days after burial the soul rises
from the grave and goes towards the rising Sun, until reaching a fork at which a narrow path
leads to the Sun and a wide path off to the left. Good souls are directed straight ahead to “one of
the finest countries that it is past the apprehensions of men to imagine the felicity that is there.”
Wicked souls, however, who murdered, stole, lay with other men’s’ wives, etc. were directed to
the left, to a land of serpents, briars, and thorns where venomous creatures torment him for
eternity. 71 The parallels to heaven and hell in Abrahamic religions are striking.
Perhaps even as early as Longe’s experience this could have been a belief borrowed from
Christian missionaries, as some might suggest. The ancient tradition of burying the personal
belongings with the deceased for use in the hereafter, however, certainly belies the notion that
pre-Columbian Cherokees had no thought for an existence beyond death. Whether or not it was
similar to the concept of heaven and hell is not clear, but one can be sure that it impacted their
rituals surrounding death and burial. One curiosity to note about the burying of personal property
with the dead is that this practice dropped away fairly rapidly after regular trade with the English
commenced. The trade introduced a heretofore unknown level of consumerism to their society,
and soon it became common for personal goods to be inherited rather than interred. This
represents one of the quickest instances of Cherokee acculturation to English folk ways. 72
70
Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," 319.
71
Longe, "A Small Postscript," 8-10.
72
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 179.
45
After death, the Cherokees mourned for either four or seven days. 73 Men maintained a
stoic composure, but female relatives lamented continually in what was described as “a doleful
wailing.” The period of mourning was a solemn time, during which no one joked about, or
expressed anger, nor any other strong emotion save sorrow. The family fasted for the entire four
or seven days, and the women neglected their dress and their hair adornments in order to look the
more aggrieved. At the conclusion of this interval the priest came to conduct the burial of the
body. The deceased was buried facing east towards the rising sun. The Cherokees accorded
beloved men the honor of being buried in the town house, under the seat in which they were
accustomed to sit in council. Others were interred under their houses, most commonly directly
beneath the place where they died. 74 Archaeological investigation shows that men not buried in
the town house were often buried in small cemeteries near the houses rather than directly under
them as was the case for many women and children. This may be because the matrilineal and
matrilocal system of Cherokee marriage gave possession of the house to the wife and her clan, so
men may have been buried instead in plots belonging to their own clan holdings. 75
Death was another anomalous event in Cherokee belief patterns, and as such it was
polluting. After the burial, the mourners and their house needed to undergo ritual purification. A
priest gathered all food and furniture, as well as any belongings of the dead not buried with him
(while that practice was still in use), from the house, and burned them. He set a purifying fire on
the hearth and boiled a sort of medicinal herbal tea for the family to drink and anoint themselves.
They then washed in the river, plunging in seven times, after which they let their old clothes
73
Butrick says both in his notes, possibly contradicting himself. Both 4 and 7 were important numbers in
Cherokee religion though, so there may have been conditions in which one or the other was true, as also happened
with the ceremony of purifying and naming a newborn infant.
74
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 184.
75
Lynne Sullivan and Christopher Rodning, "Residential Burial, Gender Roles, and Political Development
in Late Prehistoric and Early Cherokee Cultures of the Southern Appalachians," Archeological papers of the
american anthropological association 20, no. 1 (2011), 89.
46
wash away before returning to the town in new clean apparel. The priest then performed a
divination sacrifice, and afterwards the family prepared food and the whole community joined
Although they were fairly elaborate, Cherokee funerary ways were not very visible to
colonists. The details given here are supplied by particularly astute observers, but others were not
so perceptive. Timberlake, for example, wrote that, “They seldom bury their dead, but throw
them into the river.” 77 He was entirely wrong, so perhaps they kept this intimate part of their
ceremonial life away from prying colonial eyes. A long time Indian trader reported that, “they
will not associate with us, when we are burying any of our people, who die in their land: and
they are unwilling we should join with them while they are performing this kindred duty to
theirs.” 78 This notwithstanding, as seen with the burial of grave goods, there was acculturation
between colonial and Cherokee death ways. Another instance was the practice of bundle burials,
in which Cherokees would disinter the bones of their relatives and take them to a new burial site
when they relocated their towns, thus carrying their ancestors with them. This custom was also
Wealth Ways
the level of materialism in native culture remained comparatively low. Cherokee ideas about
wealth and the accumulation of possessions followed a different script from the European model.
The communal basis of their jural townships made the wellbeing of every member a more visible
76
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 229-230.
77
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 67.
78
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 181.
79
Ibid., 180.
47
and thus higher priority, and thus personal enrichment was rarely elevated. This is not to say that
they lacked the greedy among them, but the cultural context and value system they held made
possessions of less value. Their ethos of material goods was functionalist, valuing things as far as
they were immediately useful and deeming them worthless if they were not. A parallel they drew
from nature illustrates this principle; something of a metaphor recorded by James Adair,
They say, they have often seen a panther in the woods, with a brace of large fat
bucks at once, near a cool stream; but that they had more sense than to value the
beast, on account of his large possessions: on the contrary, they hated his bad
principles, because he would needlessly destroy, and covetously engross, the good
things he could not use himself, nor would allow any other creature to share of,
though ever so much pinched with hunger. 80
High hospitality was instead the rule, and nearly every foreign visitor commented on the
generosity with which they were received. The custom was to freely provide food and rest, as
well as good and attentive company, to all who journeyed through. William Bartram 81 was so
moved by their treatment of him that he fairly broke out in verse in his description, “O divine
simplicity and truth, friendship without fallacy or guile, hospitality disinterested, native,
undefiled, unmodified by artificial refinements!” 82 This free sharing, especially of food, was not
limited to strangers. The structure of their communities made providing for the poor among them
a matter simply taken for granted rather than a remarkable charity. It was said of them that “the
expression, I have only enough for myself, and none to share, is unknown to the Cherokee
Even in cases where Cherokees expected to gain something, such as when warriors went
north to Virginia at the request of the governor to lend military aid early in the French and Indian
80
Ibid., 431.
81
Bartram was a botanist who traveled extensively through the colonies recording his experiences. He
visited the Cherokees not long after the Anglo-Cherokee war, and wrote about their way of living in his journal,
which was later published.
82
Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, 284.
83
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 102.
48
War, they freely shared their goods with each other. Because the expedition took them away
from their usual winter hunt, and they were essentially acting as hired mercenaries, Virginia
provided “war presents” to the warriors who helped them defend their borders. They did not only
share their bounty with each other, but also with the colonial soldiers who fought beside them. It
must be noted that this was not an extraordinary show of virtue, but rather a general behavior
based on what they assumed was the universally accepted and normal conduct. It carried with it
the expectation of reciprocity; some colonial soldiers reported that Cherokees would help
themselves to meat from game the soldiers had killed without even asking permission. 84
Another common metric of wealth to Euro-Americans was land. With headrights and
land speculators running wild, acres joined hogsheads and pounds sterling as a measure of
success. To the Cherokee however, land was not, and had never been, at a premium. In fact, land
ownership was practically an alien concept to them. The major tribes had their territory, and
occasional disputes over hunting rights in areas, but nothing like the real estate system of Europe
ever developed. Some farm plots and the locations of houses might be said to have been
“owned” by the women who lived and tended crops there, but this was a matter of convenience
rather than legality; it never resolved into a state of crisis requiring strict private property rules to
be created. Indians would not have said they owned the land, but that they were using it at the
moment. This also impacted their “land sales,” which were not understood by Cherokee
A focus on material goods and land is thus something of a distraction. Just because
Cherokees were free with their possessions and placed little value on them beyond necessity does
not mean that they had no concept of wealth. Instead, one must look to social connections and
84
David Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740-1762 (Norman: University of
Oklahomas Press, 1962), 66-67.
85
Wahnenauhi, "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," 194
49
honorary status as the currency of Cherokee wealth. Warriors, for example, were extremely
jealous of their reputations and what a colonial elite might have called his honor. Rather than
accumulating material goods, they accumulated war names, which conferred recognition and
status. Here again, one can see the ethos of personal growth and achievement at play. 86 Also of
value were social and kinship connections. In fact, it is in this area that Cherokee and colonial
concepts of wealth intersected, albeit at opposite ends. Debt, which was the reverse of wealth to
a colonist, could be seen as a valuable connection conferring shared interests and even friendship
to a Cherokee. The nature of an ongoing transaction itself, regardless of who was debtor or
creditor, was deemed a boon; it represented the creation of a relationship valuable for its
inclusive utility. 87 Over time, the actual terms of the original agreement were even felt to be
inconsequential as the relationship was now the main thing. In fact, the phrase “an old debt” was
even a Cherokee idiom for “nothing.” 88 A parallel from modern society might be the maxim that
“it’s not what you know, but who you know,” and the idea of the value of networking in a
business environment.
An interesting example of this concept occurred in the run up to the French and Indian
War, when Cherokee head men petitioned to colonial authorities to build garrisoned forts in their
territory. There was the prima facie military application of the forts as a protection against
enemies, but a second value placed on them was equally important, that they represented a
permanent connection with mutual relational value. The overhill town of Chota desired two forts
for this reason, one built by Virginia and the other by South Carolina. 89 A single fort, jointly
built, would have served the military purpose just as well, and perhaps even better, but separate
86
Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their
Removal to the West, 1838, 168; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths : Cherokees and South Carolinians through the
Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133-134; Longe, "A Small Postscript," 46.
87
Hatley, The Dividing Paths : Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution, 208.
88
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 429.
89
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: 1754-1765, 132-133.
50
forts emphasized multiple connections. Chota, in line with the Cherokee concept of wealth, was
Cultural friction caused by the drastically different concepts of wealth held by Cherokees
and colonists occurred largely on the Cherokee side. Both parties evaluated each other using
their own standards, with opposite results. Colonists saw native generosity as remarkable
deviations from the normal, while in reality it was simply common practice. They thus viewed
Cherokee wealth ways favorably, seeing them as uncommonly, if perhaps naively, generous. The
Cherokees, on the other hand, did not understand the cultural priorities of colonial wealth ways,
and considered their white neighbors’ comparatively large stores of personal possessions to be a
sign of greed and poor virtue. Adair recorded the general feeling they had, which is far from
flattering,
They frequently tell us, that though we are possessed of a great deal of yellow and
white stone, of black people, horses, cows, hogs, and every thing else our hearts
delight in -- yet they create us as much toil and pain, as if we had none, instead of
that ease and pleasure, which flow from enjoyment; therefore we are truly poor,
and deserve pity instead of envy: they wish some of their honest warriors to have
these things, as they would know how to use them aright, without placing their
happiness, or merit, in keeping them, which would be of great service to the poor,
by diffusing them with a liberal hand. 90
This caricature became cemented into the Cherokee idea of what a white man represented, and
surely contributed to deteriorating relations. On the colonial side, the generous Cherokee would
not have been derided for their greed except by the meanest of rogues, but Cherokee pridefulness
was certainly noted and resented at times. This was what really represented the flip side of
Cherokee greed, greed for status and acknowledgment, but colonists would not have recognized
90
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 431.
51
In this way, misunderstandings between Cherokee and colonial ideas of wealth and value
caused friction and animosity. There were two levels to the confusion, the first being that neither
side fully comprehended what the other believed, and the second that those beliefs contradicted
each other. The underlying conflict could easily result in unintended slights as well as
fundamental disagreement. Change could occur, but core beliefs were resilient. Cherokees did
come to value trade goods to a greater degree, and some colonists learned to value native respect,
but foundational cultural values served as anchors so that the shift was both slow and limited in
extent.
Just as Cherokees might be convinced that giant frogs were not in fact trying to eat the
Sun, yet still believe that the universe was such that the idea was far from ridiculous, they could
also grow to value material goods more greatly, but would never value them above status and
glory. Colonial cultural patterns acted the same. Over time it became of some value to be
honored in Cherokee country, yet when gold was discovered there in 1830, desire to possess it
overshadowed any thought of retaining native respect. 91 This sort of “half way” cultural
conformation characterized eighteenth century Indian acculturation, and reveals the great
significance of basic beliefs. As long as deep foundational ideas were at odds, superficial
changes meant little in the long run. Accommodation to foreign folk ways only went so far, and
91
Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their
Removal to the West, 1838, 490.
52
Chapter Two
A Man’s World, or a Petticoat Government?
Questions of Structural Culture
Contemporary wisdom among eighteenth century colonists held to two utterly conflicting
views about how Cherokees managed their families and households. According to one popular
sentiment, the men treated their women like slaves, forcing them to do all the hard labor of tilling
the fields, cooking the food, and pretty much every other tedious chore, all the while lazing
around enjoying their own days in endless leisure. 1 Up against this was the equally prominent
idea that Cherokee men suffered under a “petticoat government,” in which women dominated
their husbands with promiscuity and even physical beatings. 2 In truth, neither of these extremes
were the case. European colonists simply did not understand Cherokee cultural structures, and
misapplied what they saw in Cherokee country to their own structures instead.
Thus, these structures are important to understand. With the basic beliefs in chapter one
as a foundation, Cherokees then organized their society along lines which were consistent with
those ideas, and which optimized their lives according to those presuppositions. Their
governmental systems, kinship ways, etc. make up the second tier of Cherokee culture. These are
the institutions which were not always immediately apparent to casual observation, but came into
view after sustained analysis by contemporaries who lived among them. As illustrated by the
confusion about the state of Cherokee gender relations, colonial and Indian structures did not
match up any more than their basic beliefs did. Colonists saw Cherokee women doing the
agriculture work, and mistakenly thought that they were mistreated because that was the kind of
hard labor European men were expected to do. They also saw women with far more liberties
1
John Payne and Daniel Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010), 22.
2
James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London: E. & C. Dilly, 1775), 146; Alexander Longe,
"A Small Postscript," in Southern Indian Studies, ed. David Corkran(1969), 30.
53
than their own wives enjoyed under European style patriarchal structures, and so the conflicting
myth of the “petticoat government” was born. The same kind of confusion occurred across the
board with these social structures, and many of them contributed to the deterioration of Anglo-
Cherokee relations.
In many ways Cherokee culture was a product of its physical environment. Centered in
the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountain chains of the southern Appalachia, the Cherokees
occupied some of the most defensible territory in the region. It has been noted that mountain
based cultures often defy outside domination and develop non-centralized, highly egalitarian
social structures. Fernand Braudel pointed out this strong predilection in his magisterial work on
the Mediterranean world, 3 and such is certainly the case with the Cherokees. The rough terrain of
the highlands they inhabited gave some measure of security as well as creating the conditions for
a highly decentralized system of regional and township autonomy. In the eighteenth century
there were four distinct regional bases of Cherokee society, divided along geographically
dictated lines. The lower, middle, valley, and overhill town regions comprised the core of
populated Cherokee land, though they claimed much larger swaths of territory around those areas
as hunting grounds. These four regions of towns, though connected as a people, carried
important distinctions. Diplomatically, they faced challenges from different directions. The
lower towns, for instance, faced their most consistent military threat from the nearby Creek
Indians, while the overhill towns were more concerned with aggressors from the north, such as
the Iroquois. Regions rarely, if ever, joined together to face these challenges, tending instead to
3
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip Ii (New York:
Harper & Row, 1972), 34-35.
54
deal with them individually. When European trade became a major concern for the tribe, regions
found themselves rivals for trade goods, and political prestige often went hand in hand with the
ability to secure sufficient access to merchants. Distance and travel time between regions even
caused divergent dialects to develop, so that a Cherokee might have been identifiable by his
In fact, decentralization extended beyond the tribe as a whole to apply to regions as well.
While towns within a region may have shared more with each other than with those from the
outside, they were far from cohesive units. They did not always act in concert, and individual
towns usually acted independently of the rest. This is particularly clear in the case of warfare, in
which each town tended to have its own war leader and would choose when and where to go to
war without need of consulting any regional or national authority. Such an authority, in fact, was
nearly non-existent. Each town grew its own crops, hunted its own meat, performed its own
religious ceremonies, and chose its own leadership. They tended not to sprawl, but were
Average towns had populations of 350-600 people, and were usually linked to smaller
settlements nearby. People living in smaller settlements usually did so in order to be in closer
proximity to resources, but they remained functionally a part of the nearest town. A Cherokee’s
town was one of the most important defining features of his identity, and many used it as a
marker in their dealings with outsiders, such as identification on official documents. Sometimes
someone would relocate from the town of his birth to a new area, often through marriage, in
which case he became affiliated with both. Skiagunta, for example, addressed the governor of
South Carolina on behalf of his people and emphasized that he once was a warrior of Keowee
4
Tyler Boulware, Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation : Town, Region, and Nation among Eighteenth-
Century Cherokees (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 11.
55
but now lived at the Sugar Town. As such, he was qualified to speak with authority on events
Despite the transitive nature of town affiliation demonstrated by Skiagunta and others,
town identity was tied to its own unique community rather than to its location. In fact, towns
were known to periodically move from one place to another, probably in reaction to farmland
yielding less over time as it was continually used. The defining feature of a town was its town
house, a large structure in which the community would regularly meet in council to make
decisions of local importance. The presence or absence of a townhouse was what differentiated a
town from a minor settlement, and those smaller settlements always affiliated with the nearest
town in matters of council and polity. The town council, a gathering of all the town members
organized along clan lines and guided by the beloved men and high priest, made up the chief
Clan sections made up the factions of the town, advocating for their own interests in
council. The elders seem to have assumed the role of leaders and mediators, keeping the young
men in line and also to some degree divorcing themselves from clan affiliation in order to make
up a body which put town needs as a whole above family interests. The historical record is quite
clear that the council was not a coercive body; open conflict was ideally avoided and the goal
was to achieve consensus. Clan sections deliberated independently on issues, and after coming to
initial positions their beloved men would then assemble as the “body of elders” to communicate
inter-clan sentiments and themselves deliberate before reporting back to the clan sections. This
cycle could repeat many times until a mutual accord emerged. Parties that would not accede to
5
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: May 21, 1750 - August 7, 1754, ed. William McDowell (Columbia:
South Carolina Archives Department, 1958), 163. Both Keowee and Sugar Town were nearby present day Salem,
South Carolina. The site of Keowee is now submerged under a lake formed by the damming of Keowee River
during the twentieth century.
56
the consensus, however, were not forced into submission. Dissenters were expected to withdraw
but were also free to do as they liked, unconstrained by any decisions made in council. 6
One intriguing case which highlights the distinct character of townships as communal
rather than local entities is that of Great Tellico and Chatuga. These two overhill towns existed
so close to each other as to be not merely side by side, but actually intermingled, the homes of
each intermixing so that the whole area appeared as one town. Nevertheless, the two each had
their own townhouses and every person knew which town he was affiliated with. In 1756 Tellico
made overtures of peace to the French against the current English alliance, and agreed to the
French proposal that they relocate westward and receive French trade and presents. Although the
issue affected everyone in the area, the two towns met separately about the matter, and came to
differing conclusions. Tellico residents chose to move, while those of Chatuga all remained and
continued their intercourse with the English. Despite long being the closest of neighbors, the two
This lack of centralized authority was a major source of frustration for the English
colonialists who attempted to make the Cherokees into a lucrative and useful trade and war
partner. Dealing with such a politically separated group was particularly alien to the elites of
Carolina and Virginia, coming from their highly hierarchical and national backgrounds in
Caribbean plantation society and England’s cavalier culture. In fact, early diplomatic efforts in
Cherokee country were focused on creating a more European style government structure there
with a single “king” who the rest of the nation would obey. Colonel George Chicken, for
example, made an extensive journey through the region in 1725 concerning regulation of trade.
6
Fred Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century,"
American Anthropological Association 64, no. 5 (1962), 39.
7
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: 1754-1765, ed. William Mcdowell (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1970), 302-303.
57
At that time the English had persuaded the Cherokees to accede to following two such “kings,”
one based overhills, and the other in the lower towns. Chicken found it very difficult, however,
to get them to assemble in one place for his conference and was frustrated by the apparent lack of
authoritarian order. At the lower town of Nocochee he informed them that “as Crow was their
King and made by them and Approved off by the English, that [Chicken] Expected they would
look upon him as such, otherwise they would be no people, and that the head men in all their
Towns would take care to keep their Young Men under them and make them obey them in
everything.” 8
In 1730 the eccentric Scotsman Alexander Cuming set out into Cherokee country with
ambitious designs. He was not a man for doing small things, and his audacious manner of
charisma worked equally well on American Indians as on the elites of Charlestown. In his
journal, Cuming noted that at that time the Cherokees had seven mother towns with elected
kings, and many towns had “princes” besides. He wrote that each town also had a head warrior
who often had greater power than the king. Cuming traveled among them, and charmed them
immensely. At Keowee and again at Nequassee he gave a “big talk,” and convinced or overawed
the Cherokees into making Moytoy of Tellico their emperor with unlimited power. Perhaps more
impressively, they also pledged their submission to Cuming and to King George II. Interpreters
and traders who witnessed the spectacle could hardly believe their eyes, and admitted that if they
had known the demands Cuming was to make of the Cherokees beforehand, they would not have
attended, expecting the proud warriors to turn to murder rather than relinquish any of their
freedoms. 9
8
George Chicken, "Journal of Colonel George Chicken's Mission from Charlestown," in Travels in the
American Colonies, ed. Newton Mereness(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 109.
9
Alexander Cuming, "Journal of Sir Alexander Cuming," in Early Travels in Tennessee Country, ed.
Samuel Williams(Johnson City: The watauga Press, 1928), 129-132.
58
There are two points attending Cuming’s seemingly overwhelming success which act as
mitigating factors. First, Cuming himself records that according to Moytoy, the Cherokees were
already planning to make him “emperor” before the Scotsman’s visit. While this could have
been simple grandstanding by the warrior of Tellico, it could equally be that the Cherokees were
making moves of their own to streamline colonial trade relations by having a common
representative. Second, the “unlimited power” of the emperor and total submission to England
never actually materialized. Cuming, for all his success, was acting as a free agent without
official directives, and the Crown seems never to have intended pressing suzerainty on the
Indians. Nevertheless, this episode was the first step in the Cherokee people beginning a process
The role of emperor proved to be less about rulership than traditionally held by the
European conception, and more one of mediator between the English and the Cherokee people.
There is little historical data on the details of how the Cherokee emperorship was organized or
operated, but it persisted for around twenty years. During that time a number of incidents
occurred which necessitated the emperor’s intervention to smooth relations. In 1734 and again in
1746 violent altercations between Cherokees and English traders resulted in diplomatic tensions
and the stoppage of trade. Although individual Cherokees of individual towns perpetrated the
offending actions, it was the whole of the Cherokee people which suffered the trade embargoes
with which South Carolina responded. Because the English were treating them corporately, the
Cherokees began to feel the need more than ever for a centralized mediator as well as a method
of control so that single troublemakers acting independently could not cause problems for the
whole tribe. During the period of the emperorship Moytoy, and his son Amouskositte after his
59
death, managed to successfully diffuse several of these diplomatic incidents. 10 Although this was
the case, it must not have suited the Cherokees liking because in the early 1750’s Amouskositte’s
influence waned and the position of emperor became overshadowed by a new political force
based in the overhill town of Chota and its chief beloved old man named Old Hop. 11
The shift in diplomatic representation from Great Tellico to Chota began a second phase
of the Cherokee people’s nucleation. Old Hop did not assume the mantle of emperor which
Moytoy and Amouskositte had been handed by Cuming; in fact for a brief time the two towns
vied for influence over the nation. According to Fred Gearing, the emperorship had operated
with an amorphous structure modeled on the native war party ways, while Old Hop’s ascendency
marked a change to diplomacy based on the priest-centered town council tradition. 12 Tribal
councils representing all of the towns as a whole began to be held in which issues important to
the still forming “Cherokee nation” would be discussed. In keeping with the egalitarian nature of
the Cherokee culture, any members of a Cherokee village were free to attend the council, along
with the village priest and other elders who went to Chota for the meetings. The political
challenges facing the Cherokees were complex. Many of their towns were at war with the Creeks
to the south, 13 both the English and French were courting their military allegiance in the Seven
Years War, and Carolina settlements close to the Cherokee border sparked tensions as they
encroached on hunting grounds. Like the town councils after which it was modeled, the tribal
council headed by Old Hop had no actual authoritarian power, relying instead on consensus and
persuasion for results. Old Hop was not able to speak for the council without its input, so
colonial officials were often obligated to wait for the chief men to be assembled rather than
10
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: May 21, 1750 - August 7, 1754, 189-196.
11
Ibid., 434, 486.
12
Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century," 89.
13
The Creek (or Muscogee) Indians inhabited a large portion of territory south of Cherokee country,
including land in present day Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.
60
simply receiving decisive answers from one ruler. 14 This set the stage for a major incident with
In 1758 large numbers of Cherokee warriors went north at the behest of Virginia to assist
them in operations against the French and their Indian allies. Things were mutually frustrating, as
the Cherokee did not understand the colonial way of war, and the Virginians poorly handled war
presents to the warriors and diplomacy in general. On their way home, tensions came to a head
and conflict erupted between them and some Virginian settlers. Several Cherokees were killed,
and the rest returned to their villages, grieved and outraged. In retaliation, several lower towns
sent raiding parties to exact vengeance from the English colonies, killing settlers in both Virginia
and Carolina. Although such retaliation was in accordance with the Cherokee way for dealing
with such matters, colonial officials saw it as an unlawful escalation to massacre. Governor
Lyttleton of South Carolina demanded that Old Hop and the tribal council turn over the
offending raiders to the colony for prosecution. This presented a major problem, because
although the council certainly wanted no conflict with the English and would have preferred to
acquiesce to their request, it did not have the coercive power to do so. The Cherokee raiders were
unwilling to voluntarily turn themselves over, and so Lyttleton seized the Cherokee’s diplomatic
delegation and held them hostage in order to force the tribe to submit. The incident exploded into
a full scale conflict, the Anglo-Cherokee War, which lasted for two years and ended with a
Cherokee surrender after two devastating campaigns by the British army in which entire towns
and their crops were burned and countless villagers starved out.
The failure of the tribal council to prevent the Anglo-Cherokee war revealed the
weakness of its structure. It was apparent that in order to forestall such incidents there needed to
be some measure of control over the actions of individual war parties from the many independent
14
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: May 21, 1750 - August 7, 1754, 38.
61
towns. In order to facilitate this, the council adapted and integrated a new “warrior arm” into its
organization. Formerly the beloved old men who made up the tribal elders were chosen without
regard for their past war experience, but after the Anglo-Cherokee War each town made sure that
a prominent ex-warrior was included in their delegation so that their warriors would be properly
represented. These old and famous warriors, moreover, no longer sat as simply a part of their
town’s delegation, but formed a separate part of the council with a tribal war chief at their head.
Between 1761 and 1768 Occonostota, known as the “great warrior” even became head of the
council. In the period from the Anglo-Cherokee War until the American Revolution the warrior
class practiced a degree of control over the people, keeping troublemakers from inciting any
The American Revolution acted as a catalyst for change, and mounting tensions from the
younger and more headstrong warriors, which had been kept under control by the council, broke
out. 15 Little Carpenter and Dragging Canoe, father and son, made up a visible expression of what
became a continuum between appeasement and aggression. Little Carpenter was an old
statesman who had seen his tribe greatly reduced over a lifetime and was fully cognizant of the
dangers of direct confrontation with the colonies. Dragging Canoe, on the other hand, eagerly
took up the tomahawk against the Cherokees’ white neighbors when given the opportunity. At
first he did so as war chief of the Cherokee tribe as allies of the British in the war, but after the
American forces took out their wrath on Cherokee lands the council decided to make peace, and
Dragging Canoe refused to comply. In keeping with the Cherokee ethos of individual autonomy,
he led whoever would follow him away. A sizeable portion of the population, including the
15
The Revolution was not the cause of the disruption, but merely an accelerant. Earlier indications were seen,
particularly the outrage of Dragging Canoe and other young warriors at the Henderson purchase in March of 1775.
See John Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their Removal
to the West, 1838 (Kingsport: Southern Publishers, 1938), 13.
62
majority of young warriors, went with him to the south and established a new group of Cherokee
towns named Chickamauga after the creek where they settled. 16 From there he continued to
wage war against the white settlers, particularly those who were encroaching on ancestral
Cherokee hunting grounds. This split represented a large step backwards in the nucleation of
Cherokee comity.
The final phase of Cherokee social evolution before the Trail of Tears debacle was
heralded by the eventual subjugation of the Chickamaugas at the hands of American back
country forces. This precipitated the Cherokee nation’s turn to accept the “civilizing” efforts of
the United States in an effort to become more acceptable to their dominant neighbors and prevent
further erosion of their lands and rights. They reluctantly abandoned their traditional lifestyle for
the hard and laborious farming economy imported from Europe. Washington sent ploughs,
spinning wheels, and other implements of the Western domicile for their use, and missionary
schools sprouted in order to convert them religiously and culturally. The effects were far more
successful than might be expected; Cherokee society began to transform, and plenty of Cherokee
plantations in the early nineteenth century resembled Anglo-American ones in nearly every way.
It was, however, too little too late. Anti-Indian prejudice was already firmly ingrained in
American frontier society; full removal of the Cherokees, no matter how “civilized” they had
become, was the ultimate result. The path of cultural adaptation and appeasement might have
worked had it been adopted earlier, or if cooler heads than the likes of Andrew Jackson had
16
This is near Chattanooga, Tennessee. The well known Civil War battle of Chickamauga also occurred
nearby, and is called after the name of the creek.
63
Family Ways
If geography and strong town identity acted to keep the Cherokee towns and regions from
centralizing, it was the familial bonds of their clan system that held them together as one people.
Like most of the other southeastern Indian tribes, the Cherokees followed a matrilineal clan
arrangement which, on the whole, Europeans did not understand or even investigate until long
after the American Revolution. Because a Cherokee belonged to the clan of his mother, not his
father, his greatest family loyalty always held to that clan. His father and father’s family may
have been close, but matrilineal clan membership was the basis of Cherokee social structure and
even legal matters. Men often lived in the households of their wives, but their clan loyalties
remained unchanged. Children were raised by their mothers, and traditionally their closest
familial authorities were their maternal uncles and aunts. Timberlake noted this maternal priority
country and local women, saying, “When they part, the children go with, and are provided for,
by the mother.” 17 A Cherokee’s mother’s brother was the traditional mentor and disciplinarian,
filling many of the roles played by a father in Western patrilineal family structures. This
divergence in cultural standards may have contributed to the misunderstanding of the father-son
liege-like role over the Cherokees, the English shifted from calling themselves “brother” to
“father” in their dealings with the Cherokees. 18 The intended message might have been better
17
Henry Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake (Cherokee: Museum of the Cherokee Indian
Press, 2007), 35.
18
For more detail on kinship metaphors used in Indian diplomacy, see Nancy Shoemaker, "An Alliance
between Men: Gender Metaphors in Eighteenth-Century American Indian Diplomacy East of the Mississippi,"
Ethnohistory 46, no. 2 (1999).
64
The clans acted as social glue, binding together the otherwise disparate regions and towns
because every town had some people from all seven clans living there. Everywhere a Cherokee
might go in Cherokee country he would find members of his clan family, and he had the right to
live among them as kin. This trend was so obvious that although he did not fully grasp the
matrilineal clan system, Daniel Butrick commented on it, noting, “Family connexions generally
settle together, so that it frequently occurs that a whole settlement is made up of near relatives.” 19
The clan system supplied much more than a sense of belonging and support, it was the basis of
Cherokee society itself. Someone who was a part of a clan derived from that their importance
and legitimacy as a part of society. This is reflected in the Cherokee’s own name for themselves,
Ani-yun-wiya, which translates to “the real people.” The clans supplied much of the structure
traditionally filled by governments. For instance, if one Cherokee were to murder another there
was no central authority to which he must answer, but the victim’s clan would be sure to exact
vengeance. Someone outside of the system simply had no rights or protections. Outsiders could
be incorporated into the system through ritual adoption, oftentimes by taking war prisoners to
replenish lost population. There was a sharp distinction, however, between war captives who
were incorporated and those who were not. Captives chosen for adoption acquired all the rights
and privileges of tribal membership, becoming fully incorporated into the kin group, while other,
less fortunate captives, were relegated to the role of slaves. They had no rights, even the
fundamental right to life; any infraction was reason enough for a clan member to end their lives:
When a Shawnee captive refused to accompany his Cherokee master Black Dog,
he was killed immediately with a tomahawk. Black Dog did not act out of wanton
cruelty but rather from the fact that his slave did not possess the right to live. The
captive who was not adopted, the atsi nahsa'i, simply existed outside the kinship
system from which one's personal and legal rights stemmed. Consequently the
19
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 180.
65
atsi nahsa'i faced a painfully uncertain future with his continued existence
depending solely on his master's protection and good will. 20
The extended family of the clan system thus accorded a Cherokee his status as a member of
society as a whole.
Another area where the English patrilineal and Cherokee matrilineal systems caused
confusion occurred with children of mixed parentage. Almost always these were the result of
white traders or frontiersmen coupling with Cherokee women. These Cherokee, in keeping with
their system of kinship, considered these children to be full members of their people, while the
colonists expected them to be loyal to their father’s country. In most cases this did not present
much occasion for problems, as the European denigration of bastards (as they were often
considered) did not accord them much social importance. A few cases did arise however, when
the Cherokees wished to assign or sell land to these individuals and the English interpreted the
act as violating proclamations against private purchase of Indian land. Both Alexander Cameron
and Richard Pearis, for example, were the recipients of large tracts of land from the Cherokee
leadership. Both men were traders and the fathers of Métis Cherokee children, and the land gifts
were probably intended to create a buffer territory owned by Cherokee families which were
equally respected by whites, thus preempting further colonial encroachments. Colonial officials
did not consider the gifts legitimate, perceiving them as an attempt at the Indians relieving debts
to the traders through land rather than skins; they failed to realize that the children these men had
by Cherokee mothers tied them closely into the kinship system. People of mixed parentage could
find it a double edged sword, granting a high degree of intercultural fluidity while at the same
time being pulled in two directions at once and never truly belonging in either camp.
20
Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1979), 12.
66
Marriage Ways
Cherokee culture. Western ideas of a solemn contract with spiritual and even political
significance simply did not apply. James Adair recorded that the Cherokees freely wed and
divorced in a fluid manner: “their marriages are ill observed, and of a short continuance; like the
Amazons they divorce their fighting bed-fellows at their pleasure, and fail not to execute their
authority, when their fancy directs them to a more agreeable choice.” 21 The union between man
and wife seems to have been impermanent and merely for convenience. Indeed, divorce seems to
have been so easy and free of consequences because marriage itself supplied very few
meaningful ties. Neither man nor woman changed clan allegiance because of marriage, and any
attachment that children retained to their fathers was purely sentimental. A man might provide
for his wife and children, but then again he might not; there was no contractual obligation
involved. Missionaries in the early nineteenth century wrote that marriage “was formerly but
little known. The Cherokee once took as many wives as he pleased but did not support them or
The question of who one could marry was a function of clan. Incestuous unions were
avoided by a prohibition from marrying within a Cherokee’s own clan or the clan of their father.
With seven clans making up the Cherokee people, this meant that there were five clans to which
any Cherokee could look for a mate. It is worth noting that because of how the clan system
worked, marriage between a man and his father’s daughter by another wife of a different clan
would be allowed; they were not reckoned clan relatives. There were favored clans into which a
Cherokee might marry, those being the clans of his maternal and paternal grandfathers. Man
21
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 182.
22
Ann Paine, quoted in Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 174.
67
referred to all females from these clans as their “grandmothers.” Social conventions made
Cherokees related in this manner particularly close and socially unrestrained, such that it could
The Cherokee marriage ceremony in which the groom presented a piece of venison to his
bride, and she an ear of corn to him as pledge that they would supply food for the family may
point to an incongruity with what the missionaries recorded. It is worth noting, however, that this
was only one of several Cherokee marriage ceremonies observed by whites; the historian John
Reid believes that western visitors expected to find an “official” and solemn marriage ceremony
similar to those in their own culture, and observing a number of incidental practices simply saw
what they expected to see. Lieutenant Henry Timberlake, who traveled among the Cherokee
Nonetheless, hunting for meat was the task of men, and tending the cornfields that of women,
and it is likely that husbands and wives did provide for each other, though it was not strictly
required of them by marriage. In an extreme example, the Cherokee wives of English soldiers
under siege in Fort Loudoun during the Anglo-Cherokee War defied the war leaders of their own
town to supply their white husbands with food during the crisis. 25 William Butrick reported that
a Cherokee warrior, on returning from war, “delivered his spoil to his wife, or nearest female
23
Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knocksville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 193.
24
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 35.
25
Ibid., 35.
68
relative, who took it home, while warriors continued their march to the council house.” 26 This at
Cherokee marriage was matrilocal, with husbands usually making their home in the
abode of the wife. Women owned the house, and in the case of divorce retained it. Oftentimes if
a man moved from one town to another, as was the case with Skiagunta, it was as a result of
marrying a woman from another area. Because men spent much of the year abroad hunting or at
war, however, “home” outside of town affiliation was less of a defining part of their identity.
Such regular absences may have accounted for the fluidity of marriage and divorce; Adair noted
a striking lack of emotional attachment, or at least emotional display, between Indian spouses
If the husband has been a year absent on a visit to another nation, and should by
chance overtake his wife near home, with one of his children skipping along side
of her; instead of those sudden and strong emotions of joy that naturally arise in
two generous breasts at such an unexpected meeting, the self-interested pair go
along as utter strangers, without seeming to take the least notice of one another,
till a considerable time after they get home. 27
Cherokee custom also allowed for polygamy, though by most accounts it was not
particularly common. When it did occur, the matrilocal character of Cherokee marriage made it
likely that it would be a case of sororal polygyny, the union of one man to two or more sisters
who often lived together. Adair even reports that they did not scruple against marrying a woman
and her daughter by another man at the same time. 28 Plural wives may have been a rarity due to
the difficulty in providing for them as Charles Hudson suggests, 29 though as noted such
provision was not necessarily a husband’s strict marital duty. Perhaps more likely is that the
26
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 24.
27
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 144.
28
Ibid., 218.
29
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 199.
69
common irregularity of permanent marriage and the general sexual permissiveness of Cherokee
society simply made polygamy unnecessary and more of a hassle than not.
If marriages were often of short duration and affection not always enduring, it does not
mean that such was the ideal towards which Cherokee lovers strove. As quoted by Timberlake
above, a good number of couples stayed attached until death. Affection formed the basis of
Cherokee marriage, as opposed to contractual duty which ruled over unions of the European sort.
This is no more apparent than when Adair relates the reaction of an Indian beloved man to
hearing about a white man being fined for the crime of infidelity within an unhappy marriage.
The beloved man’s reply was, “as marriage should beget joy and happiness, instead of pain and
misery, if a couple married blindfold, and could not love each other afterwards, it was a crime to
continue together, and a virtue to part.” 30 Certainly long and affectionate marriages did occur in
Cherokee country, perhaps one of the best examples being Moytoy of Great Tellico and his wife.
Upon being made the first Cherokee emperor by Alexander Cuming, Moytoy chose to remain at
home nursing his ill wife rather than making the prestigious voyage overseas to London to have
an audience with King George. 31 This selfless display illustrates at least one case of ideal marital
Sex Ways
While colonial America was far less prudish than the stereotype of the New England
Puritan portrayed in popular culture, Cherokee attitudes towards sex did strike their white
neighbors as far too free and promiscuous. The social egalitarianism which contributed to a less
permanent tradition of marriage also resulted in a less restrained attitude towards sex in general.
30
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 432.
31
Cuming, "Journal of Sir Alexander Cuming," 127.
70
There were no constraints on fornication for either men or women. This was a cultural feature
shared with most other Southeastern Indian tribes, but the Cherokee carried it even further in that
they also allowed full sexual freedom to a married woman. James Adair noted that they “are an
exception to all civilized or savage nations in having no laws against adultery… and allow their
women full liberty to plant their brows with horns as oft as they please, without fear of
punishment.” 32 This was seemingly well known and even exploited by nearby tribes. In 1750 a
diplomatic move by Governor Glen of South Carolina to the Creeks in an effort to make peace
between them and the Cherokees found broad based support, especially among the young Creek
men. In a letter to the governor, Indian trader William Sludders wrote “[T]here is no [Cherokee]
law for meddling with their women… which fills all the Young Fellows Hearts with Joy.” 33
Apparently Creek men wanted peace with the Cherokees so they could indulge in affairs with
This state of affairs was not necessarily always the case, and may not have been
smallpox epidemic swept through Cherokee country, and the priests attributed it to the recent
adulterous behavior of their young people who, “had, in a most notorious manner, violated their
ancient laws of marriage in every thicket.” 34 Certainly the lack of laws against adultery did not
mean that a scorned spouse was free from jealous emotions, and in at least one case a man’s
family exacted revenge upon his wayward wife in a violent and shaming way. 35 The Payne-
Butrick Papers record divination ceremonies performed by jealous husbands who suspected their
wives of unfaithfulness. In one example, a priest released flies which, if she were guilty, would
32
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 146-147.
33
Letter from William Sludders to James Glen, July 11, 1750, Minutes of Sept. 5, 1750, S. C. Council
Journal [5], quoted In John Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New
York University Press, 1970), 115.
34
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 233.
35
Ibid., 147.
71
stir, fly to her, and burrow into her body causing her to die in seven days. Butrick wryly
comments that, “whether the fly received any assistance from the husband or the priest is not
reported.” 36
Husbands were not the only ones subject to jealousy. Longe reported that oftentimes
when a man took a mistress, she and his wife would have a bloody battle over him, with the
victor keeping him as her mate! This could cause lifelong feuds. In Longe’s words, “If these two
women were to live a thousand years in the same town, nay, next door, they never will have any
communication together, nor so much as speak the one to the other.” 37 Besides such temporal
consequences, there may have been longer reaching religious concerns about adultery as well.
One Cherokee priest, when questioned about the afterlife, described a heavenly realm for the
righteous dead, one qualification of which was honoring marriage, “But it is such peoples as do
not steal, nor lays with other men's wives, nor tells lies, nor cause quarrels nor bloodshed…” 38
These suggest that though there may have been no law against promiscuity, it was still deemed a
social ill and was probably not flaunted openly. Nonetheless, promiscuity did seem to be the
One particular social boundary involved separation of the sexes in ritual purity. Men
abstained from sexual intercourse for a span before and after going to war in order to avoid
having their vigor polluted by such contact. Butrick reports that after being purified by the priest
in preparation for war, “none must have any further intercourse with women till the war was
concluded.” 39 Similarly, women secluded themselves during their monthly period, as it was seen
36
John Payne and Daniel Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010), 30-31.
37
Longe, "A Small Postscript,", 32.
38
Ibid., 8.
39
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 23.
72
as a time when she was particularly feminine and unsuitable to be around the men. 40 These
customs reflect the Cherokee philosophy of keeping like with like and not mixing opposed
elements. It was considered detestable, for example, to put out fire with water, its opposite, or to
wash a carcass in the stream mixing blood and water. In the same way, the feminine and the
masculine were separate natures and it was considered taboo for them to come together during a
particularly masculine time (such as war or a ball play) or feminine time (such as a woman’s
period or childbirth). 41 The Indian trader Alexander Longe reported that mothers would bar their
husbands from their beds during the first year of nursing a child “for fear that it should spoil the
child’s milk and cause it to die.” 42 Constraints on sexual activity of this kind were stronger than
Cherokee sex ways were alien and alarming to white colonists. Adventurous individuals
such as traders might have enjoyed the sexual liberties to be had in Cherokee country, but
colonial society as a whole frowned upon the customs and feared their corrupting influence.
Priber John, a French agent who planned to create an anti-English Cherokee empire based
around Cherokee culture and a government of his own devising, wrote about the Cherokee social
customs he planned to adopt in his nation. The English later captured him and confiscated his
book, and a Georgia woman named Frederica wrote scathingly to the South Carolina Gazette of
its revelations,
40
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 125-126.
41
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 148, 260.
42
Longe, "A Small Postscript," 34.
43
"Extract of a Letter from Frederica in Georgia.," South Carolina Gazette, Auguas 16, 1743 .
73
Over the course of the eighteenth century colonial sentiment increasingly viewed sexual
immorality as a defining characteristic of Indian women. Tom Hatley documents the growing use
of the appellative “squaw” as a derogatory descriptor. In the early half of the century “wench”
was the preferred term, and applied to a broad base of sexually loose women without racial
connotations, but as time progressed, “squaw” became a synonymous label, and all Indian
women became saddled with that reputation. 44 Cherokee men were not immune either, as
reflected in a satirical piece published in London during the visit of three Cherokee chiefs with
Henry Timberlake which bemoaned the attraction they held for the women of the empire, “Ye
Females of Britain, so wanton and witty / Who love even Monkies, and swear they are pretty /
The Cherokee Indians, and stranger Shimpanzeys / By Turns, pretty Creatures, have tickl'd your
Fancies…” 45
Attempts to reform the Cherokees of their “licentious savage ways” were rarely
successful. One such instance concerned the marriage of a colonial gentleman to a Cherokee
woman named Dark Lanthorn. In order to make her a proper and faithful wife, he gave her
Anglican priest. They were married in both Cherokee and English traditions, and the priest
proudly entered her into a list of converts in the Church at Congarees. Cultural mores did not
prove so easily molded however, “afterward to his great grief, he was obliged on account of her
adulteries, to erase her name from thence, and enter it anew in some of the crowded pages of
female delinquents.” 46 This trend continued into the early nineteenth century which saw a
concerted effort by the United States to “civilize” the Cherokees. Customs of polygamous and
44
Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths : Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 152.
45
Henry Howard, "A New Humorous Song, on the Cherokee Chiefs Inscribed to the Ladies of Great
Britain, 1762," Collection online, London.
46
Adair, The History of the American Indians,130.
74
cultural values. Missionary endeavors to Christianize the Cherokees faced this stiff yet covert
resistance with questionable results. Even highly acculturated natives, such as members of the
Brainerd mission school, were apt to be suspended from Church membership on charges of
In line with the Cherokee matrilineal kinship system, mothers and maternal aunts and
uncles primarily raised the children. Cherokees considered childbirth and early child rearing a
particularly feminine event, strictly separate from male involvement. A woman’s own mother or
grandmother would typically attend her in a secluded tent and provide every needed assistance.
The rare exception was a prayer or divination given by a priest in the case of a particularly hard
labor, though likely from a distance. 48 New mothers remained secluded away for two to three
days after giving birth, and then purified themselves in the river and rejoined the community.
The child itself was carefully looked after throughout, and various omens were deemed
significant. Sometimes a newborn was passed before a fire and a prayer addressed to the element
on its behalf to ensure an auspicious life. Four, or sometimes seven days after birth (both ritually
47
Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835, 180. The Brainerd Mission was a
Christian missionary school which operated in Chattanooga from 1817 until the removal of the Cherokees in the
Trail of Tears.
48
Frans Olbrechts reported in 1931 that a male practitioner was sometimes present in cases where the
mother was ill or the labor was expected to otherwise be particularly difficult, though this may have been a more
recent development from eighteenth century custom. Frans Olbrechts, "Cherokee Belief and Practice with Regard to
Childbirth," Anthropos 26, (1931), 25.
75
significant numbers to the Cherokees), a priest took the infant and performed a ceremony in
which he prayed and dipped the child seven times in a river or creek. 49
Children belonged to their mother’s clan, retaining no real connection to their father’s
family other than for purposes of marriage (marriage into one’s father’s clan was prohibited to
avoid incestuous relationships). Sons looked to their maternal uncles for masculine role models,
and such uncles served as mentors and disciplinarians much as fathers did in Europe. This is not
to say that fathers and their children shared no feelings or emotional investment, but much like
marital sentiments it was not built into the kinship system. In fact, there is plenty of evidence for
fatherly affection, and even cases of fathers proudly taking on their own son’s names if they
achieved some great honor. 50 Nonetheless, a father’s part in his children’s lives was relatively
minor. John Haywood reported that a Cherokee mother had the right to punish her children even
with death in extreme cases, while a father who killed his child, even by accident, was held liable
by the mother’s clan and was himself put to death for the offense. 51
Some infant sons were dedicated to the priesthood, and at their very birth were attended
by a priest who fed them a purifying drink before they were given to their mother to nurse. Such
children lived strict lives, being watched over not only by their mothers but also by a selected
older matron and the town priest who stringently kept them from any activity which might
introduce ritual pollution. Such circumstances were rare from infancy, but not unheard of. More
common was for such dedication to take place at around nine to ten years of age. From this point
on, these acolytes were the understudies of the priest, who would often take them to some
secluded place and instruct them in the mysteries, rituals, and divinations of the Cherokee
49
James Mooney, "The Cherokee River Cult," The Journal of American Folklore 13, no. 48 (1900), 2;
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1 256; Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume
2, 66.
50
Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation, 119.
51
John Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee (Knoxville: Heiskell & Brown, 1823),
259.
76
religion. This did not seem to preclude other pastimes such as the more typical practice of
hunting and going to war, but probably made for a more strenuous upbringing. 52
Boys and girls were treated differently from birth. Charles Hudson writes that boys were
wrapped in cougar skins and their female counterparts in deer or bison, the significance being a
metaphor for gender roles in courtship as men “hunted” women like a cougar might hunt a
deer. 53 Frans Olbrechts describes the continuing activities of young children along gender lines,
with little boys of four to five years of age “making their first attempts at making bows and
arrows and in a few weeks become remarkable marksmen. Little girls, at just as tender an age,
fall into line and assist their mother and elder sisters with the household cares.” 54 Haywood’s
report of mothers being able to discipline their children with death notwithstanding, parents
were, on the whole, very fond of their children and often excessively permissive in their rearing.
Butrick was of the opinion that they indulged them “to a degree which often proves their ruin.” 55
The harshest punishment that was actually likely to be incurred was “scratching,” in which a
small comb like implement often made of garfish teeth was drawn across the skin leaving marks
while not drawing blood. This punishment may have been painful, but the real censure in it was
the marks which were left. They could persist for days and perhaps even weeks, and were a
visible reminder of the wrongdoing which all could see and chide the young person about. 56
Indeed, one of the foremost methods of disciplining wrongdoing among the Cherokee was to
publicly and sarcastically tease the wrongdoer on the particulars of their misdeeds until they
52
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 109-112.
53
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 322.
54
Olbrechts, "Cherokee Belief and Practice with Regard to Childbirth," 31.
55
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 66.
56
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 324.
57
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 430-431.
77
The general tendency towards leniency, however, was likely a result of the Cherokee
affection for liberty and free spiritedness, characteristics they wanted to instill in their children,
particularly their sons. 58 The men most useful to the community were strong hunters and
warriors with powerful spirit and autonomy. It may have been felt that overbearing discipline
would result in a subdued and therefore weak man who would be more of a liability than an asset
to the town and to his clan. Instead, children were encouraged to learn by doing, and in due
course to learn proper behavior by experiencing the consequences of poor behavior for
themselves.
The boys specially chosen to be brought up in the priesthood faced more restrictions in an
effort to keep them ritually pure. A young conjurer in training had far less contact with women,
including his own mother, lest he be polluted by her monthly courses. The town’s chief priest
would spend many days and nights with him fasting and instructing him in the ceremonies and
divinations of the people. One peculiarity was a winnowing process, wherein the priest had his
young ward stare at the sun from its rising to its setting, never turning his eyes away. This was
supposed to imbue the child with supernatural sight and the ability to perfectly execute any
priestly duties throughout his life. It is not reported whether anyone ever actually accomplished
the feat. Of paramount importance was the instruction in the use of the divining stone, offering of
sacrifices, and the purifying “going to water” in which the Cherokees would plunge into the river
to wash away uncleanness. Priests could have as many as seven such students, and typically
bequeathed one of them with his office and his divining stone when he neared death. 59
The baseline ethos of Cherokee child rearing was intrinsically different from that of
European colonists, particularly strict religious communities such as the Quakers or Puritans.
58
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 323.
59
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 110-112.
78
They rooted their reluctance to enforce overbearing discipline in their beliefs about autonomy
and judgment. Haywood realizes this when he writes, “They are rarely chided even in infancy,
and never chastened with blows. Reason, they say, will guide their children, when they are come
to the use of it, and before that time they cannot commit faults.” 60 Where they observed the most
concrete limits tended to be in the area of ritual purity and other such strictures which likely
would be termed “superstitious” by any outsiders looking in. Curiously this shows that Cherokee
habits in this regard were as tightly tied to their religious beliefs as colonial ones, but those
beliefs themselves were separated by the wide gulf between Cherokee animistic tendencies and
the Christian emphasis on moral correction. Both had the ultimate purpose of rearing their
children to be the best people they could be, but had different ideas of what that looked like.
One interesting manifestation of this is to compare the upbringing ways of the Virginian
elite “cavaliers” with those of the Cherokee. At first glance, the two seem incredibly similar;
according to David Hackett Fischer, “young Virginians at a very early age were actively
encouraged to exercise their wills. Parents took pride in their youngsters’ childish acts of psychic
autonomy.” 61 What seems like a harmony between the two cultures, however, turns out to be the
opposite; Cherokee autonomy was based in a belief in liberty and near personal sovereignty,
while Virginians held to a strict social hierarchy. The purpose of the cavaliers’ indulgences was
to prepare their high ranking children to exercise their wills over the wills of their inferiors. This
sort of institutionalized coercive power was unheard of in Cherokee culture, and such
disagreement on foundational philosophies could cause tensions. Virginian elites would not have
approved of the “lower status savages” employing the same autonomy that they enjoyed, and
Cherokees would have chafed at being looked down upon by the Virginians, who they
60
Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, 254.
61
David Hacket Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 311.
79
considered their equals. This is just one way that the child rearing customs of the Cherokees and
the colonists reflects the issues the created tensions and conflict. Differing cultural standards
The emigrants who settled closest to the Cherokees were the borderlanders, bringing a
slightly different set of cultural traditions with them from the north of England. Their child
rearing ways were also similar to native practice in emphasizing boldness, self-assertion, and
autonomy. The aim for these colonists was not to reinforce a strict hierarchy like the Virginians,
but to promote fierce honor defending fighters according to their warrior ethos. Tough, stubborn,
and volatile personalities resulted from this upbringing, exemplified by men like Andrew
Jackson who was known for his prowess in battle and propensity to engage in violent duels at the
least provocation. 62 The bent towards frequent violence was not tempered by the tradition of
seeking harmony among men as with the Cherokee. Furthermore, the fact that both the
borderlanders and the Cherokees promoted autonomy and a strong warrior tradition, yet still
differed in so many other regards, made that particular similarity itself a problem. Like two alpha
wolves in the same wilderness, clashes were almost inevitable. This was a frequent pattern with
these two groups. Their close proximity caused both friction and acculturation, but immediate
friction outweighed the potential gains of acculturation over time, and the peace was regularly
shattered when tensions reached a critical mass. Such examples characterize how seemingly
innocuous life ways such as child rearing could cause significant cultural friction.
Naming Ways
Cherokee onomastics, or naming practices, were more complex than the colonial name
and surname method. It was more of an ongoing process, and a Cherokee Indian’s name was
62
Ibid., 687-690.
80
more indicative of his actual characteristics and personal identity than names are in modern
American culture. One might well be justified in rhetorically asking, like the poet, “what’s in a
name?” of a European Romeo, or a John Smith. Even descriptive epithets such as Innocent, or
Chastity, so popular in New England probably reflected parental aspirations more than stark
reality. Cherokee naming ways were not entirely different, at first, but such a practice served as
the beginning of a far more intricate process which never really ended. A Cherokee’s name
might change, be supplanted, or be added to over his entire lifetime to reflect his deeds and
identity.
A child’s initial name was given soon after birth, four or seven days after according to
Butrick. 63 This probably indicates that the naming was a part of the river purification ceremony
performed by the priest during those same intervals, as discussed earlier. 64 The name itself was
not given by the parents, but by an elder of the community. Olbrechts reported that it was one of
the prominent old women, and Longe clarifies that in the case of a male child the grandfather or
another older paternal relative, or in the case of a female the grandmother, chose the name. This
is a curious instance of the father’s clan having a role in the life of the child in a matrilineal
kinship system. 65 Regardless of where the name originated, it was a first designation for the
individual only. Even these initial names, however, were descriptive rather than expectant.
According to Adair, “They give their children names, expressive of their tempers, outward
appearances, and other various circumstances.” 66 In addition to this, it seems, the elder would
also add some inherited name from a significant ancestor, such as “captain bird” or “war king”
63
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 184.
64
Mooney, "The Cherokee River Cult," 2.
65
Longe, "A Small Postscript," 32; Olbrechts, "Cherokee Belief and Practice with Regard to Childbirth,"
29. It is possible that Longe was mistaken, and the child’s name was given by an elder uncle of his own clan, but it
is impossible to know for sure and is fairly immaterial.
66
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 191.
81
for a boy or “lovely girl” or “the dance leader” for a girl. 67 It seems that this served the same
lineal purpose as the surname did in European practice. Even as an infant then, Cherokees’
names reflected both their physical or temperamental character as well as their ancestral heritage.
This was a foundation on which further names would build up a “name form” of the individual’s
Subsequent names arose from particularly striking physical features, memorable events,
To this first name another name could be substituted later on; this name, that
usually clung definitely to the individual for the rest of his life, was usually
descriptive of one of his physical or moral qualities, or reminiscent of one of his
feats on the war-path, while hunting, &c. 68
The most prominent outworking of this was seen in the significant effort Cherokee men put into
striving after ever more prestigious war names. The accumulation of these titles was a major
occupation of the warriors, especially the first of them for any one individual, since before he
earned such a title he was relegated to doing the menial tasks associated with childhood while on
the warpath. 69 After a successful raid the town chief and his second would ceremoniously give
out war names along with substantial gifts of beads and deer skins stored up especially for the
occasion. The gifts were something of an added bonus, but the name was the real prize. Titles
served as rank during war as well as conferring prestige, with “war king” being the highest honor
to be bestowed. So great was the lure of these names that some warriors were known to
accumulate twenty or more during their lifetimes. 70 Butrick reported that killer was the highest
title, followed by raven, owl, wolf and fox. Warriors wore special skins of these animals as
badges of the rank they carried in the war party. Raven, owl, wolf, and fox were distinguished as
67
Longe, "A Small Postscript," 32.
68
Olbrechts, "Cherokee Belief and Practice with Regard to Childbirth," 29.
69
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 325.
70
Longe, "A Small Postscript," 46.
82
the scouts, or spies, of the army. The great chief Raven served the position of forward spy, and
was even sometimes deemed to have supernatural abilities to become invisible and silent. 71
In addition to their birth names and earned names, the Cherokees were fond of applying
nicknames to each other which had the tendency of sticking, probably not always to the
appreciation of the recipient, in the case of a less than complimentary sobriquet. Adair recorded a
few such names, like Sooreh, which meant literally “the turkey-buzzard” and was applied to a
“dull stalking fellow.” Another such was Kana Cheesteche meaning “the wasp” and given to
someone with an ill temper likely to lash out if annoyed. Someone with a hoarse sounding voice
might be saddled with a name meaning the bullfrog. Nicknames were not always at the person’s
expense however, and could sometimes be a source of pride in the same way a war name could.
One example given was “the grasshopper,” which referenced its quick movements and
celebrated quick wit and oratory skill. 72 The most insulting of epithets Adair spoke of was
Hoobuk Waske, meaning a “known eunuch.” In 1750 the Iroquois and Cherokee were joined
together in a war against the Catawba tribe, and were so enraged at having been called Hoobuk
Waske by them that they composed a letter to South Carolina’s governor imploring him to not try
to mediate the conflict as they were firmly resolved to exact vengeance for the slight. 73
Where Cherokee and colonial cultures intersected, the use of names was different enough
to cause some confusion. Their white neighbors typically had only a single name, perhaps one or
two titles if he were an elite nobleman, where most Cherokee warriors would have several
compounded names and was likely to hold multiple war names as well. These names were not
merely descriptive in the native mind either. According to James Mooney, “The Indian regards
his name, not as a mere label, but as a distinct part of his personality, just as much as are his eyes
71
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 252.
72
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 194.
73
Ibid., 137-138.
83
or his teeth, and believes that injury will result as surely from the malicious handling of his name
as from a wound inflicted on any part of his physical organism.” 74 Interestingly this is similar to
ancient superstitions in European folklore and occult practices, as immortalized in such folk tales
as the Germanic story of Rumpelstiltskin, but belief in such things on a practical level was
certainly not normative in the colonies, even where witchcraft was still a public concern. The
Cherokee insistence, though, had the curious effect of obscuring their actual names from written
This belief was found among the various tribes from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
and has occasioned a number of curious regulations in regard to the concealment
and change of names. It may be on this account that both Powhatan and
Pocahontas are known in history under assumed appellations, their true names
having been concealed from the whites until the pseudonyms were too firmly
established to be supplanted. 75
One consequence of this was that Cherokees were often known to the English by names such as
Little Carpenter, Old Hop, or Judd’s Friend; names which followed the Cherokee descriptive
paradigm but were entirely English language constructions, not even direct translations from the
Cherokee tongue. These renderings are somewhat evocative of the oftentimes farcical names
given to slaves by their masters in the plantation societies of the Caribbean and the Carolinas. 76
It is certainly not outside the realm of possibility that such connotations may have planted a
latent animus against Indians in those societies, particularly as Indian slaves themselves were
fixtures on plantations alongside black bondsmen for some time. The colonists did not link a
name with the person’s life achievements and personality, where the Indians did. Where colonial
74
James Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," in 7th Annual Report(Washington: Bureau of
American Ethnology, 1891), 343.
75
Ibid., 343.
76
Clearly ludicrous names such as “Pickle” or “Taffy” joined more sarcastic selections from the classical
world like “Plato” or “Minerva.” The renaming served to cement a slave’s place as owned property, and put them on
a lower tier in Europeans’ social perceptions. Cf. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor (New
York: Cosimo Inc., 2008).
84
names were static, Cherokee names grew over time. This was not the only way the two cultures
Time Ways
Just as the Cherokees’ religious and supernatural beliefs were derived from their
observations of the world around them, so was their basic conception of time and the way they
ordered it in their lives. The ebb and flow of the Cherokee year revolved around their hunting
and agricultural seasons and lunar cycles, and tied in with their ideas about gender roles. The two
ideas were metaphorically connected, as the Cherokees believed the Moon and Sun to be a male
and a female deity connected with love and fertility. 77 Women in Cherokee culture tended to do
most of the agricultural work, and fertility also has strong agricultural connotations. Minor
festivals at each new moon set the regular rhythm of the Cherokee year along the lines of the
lunar calendar. In addition to these, they also celebrated six major annual festivals which
characterized how they ordered their communal activities through the seasons.
The Cherokees called the first of these “The Great Moon Festival,” and it occurred at the
first new moon of autumn. This signified their new year, and the timing lined up with their
traditional account of the world’s creation, as it was supposed to have happened in autumn. 78 It
usually fell somewhere around the month of October, and was followed in quick succession by
two other festivals, the “Propitiation” or “Friends Made” festival, and the festival of the
Exulting. These set the tone for the whole year, and emphasized cleansing and mended
relationships. Sometime around March was the festival of the “New Moon of Spring,” something
of a halfway point in the year. In late June or early July was the first agricultural festival, that of
77
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 126-127.
78
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 42.
85
the “New Green Corn.” It was signaled by the year’s corn crop first being fit to eat. Around
forty-five days later, around September, came the concluding feast of “Ripe Green Corn,” which
signified a successful harvest and the corn being hard and perfect. No major celebrations were
made during winter, which was an important hunting season for Cherokee men, when most of
them would be absent from the towns, off in the hunting grounds to find game. During the
festival of the “First New Moon of Spring” the people feasted on meat brought back by the
hunters from their winter expedition.79 Superimposed onto the Western calendar, the Cherokee
January
February
March First New Moon of Spring
April
May
June
July New Green Corn
August
September Ripe Green Corn
Great New Moon
October Propitiation
Exulting
November
December
The concentration of communal celebrations at the cusp of autumn, four all in rapid
succession around September and October, and especially the last three, marked an important
part of the year for the machinery of Cherokee town society. Nearly all of the festivals placed
some emphasis on personal and corporate purifying, and that of Propitiation or “Friends Made,”
was specifically for the purpose of renewing friendships and laying rivalries to rest. The weeks
between the festivals themselves were politically important, as the major council meetings of the
79
Ibid., 35.
86
year were held and any pressing issues hashed over. It created a serendipitous time for this, as all
the people from smaller settlements attached to a major town would congregate there for the
festivities, and therefore a maximum of the population would be able to participate in council.
The harmony promoting religious nature of the festivals would also have helped the council
process, particularly as the Cherokee system of consensus governing required near unanimity for
successful results. 80
The festivals add some detail to what was, in a broader sense, a binary annual cycle of
cold and warm seasons, the cold running from around October to April, and the warm from there
on to October again. As can be seen, the New Moon feasts of autumn and spring marked the
general transition times between these two seasons. The cold season, or gola, might be thought
of as having a male character, as the men often spent most of the time ranging far off (sometimes
as far as 200 miles) to hunt and provide food for the community. Likewise the warm season, or
gogi, was the feminine counterpart, during which the women tended to the fields in order to
provide a harvest of corn for the town. Thus, the celebration at the New Moon of Spring
represented the bounty of the hunt, while the Green Corn celebrations in July and September
On a more day-to-day level, Cherokee time ways were fairly casual. More casual, in fact,
than colonists tended to be comfortable with. The native mindset urged him to use his time to do
what was necessary for a felicitous life, but not more than that. Adair said of them, “They are a
very dilatory people, and noted for procrastinating every thing that admits of the least delay.” 82
Antoine Bonnefoy was a Frenchman who gained firsthand experience of this. A Cherokee war
party captured him in 1741, and subsequently adopted him into the tribe. According to his
80
Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century," 4-5.
81
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 270.
82
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 417.
87
journal, he was treated in all ways like a kinsman after the adoption process, and beyond the
need to hunt from time to time, he found his days free of responsibility and readily spent in
leisure. 83 To the Cherokee, time was equally suited to needful productive activity and to enjoying
life in relaxation and sport. This certainly did not accord with the cultural traditions of a society
obsessed with making every moment pay for itself. Some of Benjamin Franklin’s famous
maxims neatly illustrate the difference, such as “since you are not sure of a minute, throw not
away an hour,” or “up sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.” 84 This
dichotomy compounded with the fact that even the hunt, that most important of a Cherokee
man’s occupation, was considered by many sectors of European society as more of a sport than a
proper method of “making a living.” Perhaps the best reflection of colonial sentiment in regard to
Cherokee time ways is summed up in a crude proverb which became popular among early
traders to their country, “an Indian is never in haste, only when the devil is at his arse.” 85
Rank Ways
Cherokee egalitarianism and non hierarchical gender ways might lead one to believe that
they would eschew any form of ranking in their society, but that is far from the truth. Eighteenth
century Cherokees had a very clear idea of what made a good man or woman, and they ranked
themselves according to how well they approached the ideal goal. Clear and wise judgment,
harmony with ones fellows, courage in combat, and meritorious achievement were all factors
which contributed to an individual’s ranking in society. Great deeds conferred esteem on those
who could perform them, and were most admired if they benefitted the community as a whole.
83
Antoine Bonnefoy, "Journal of Antoine Bonnefoy's Captivity among the Cherokee Indians, 1741-1742,"
in Travels in the American Colonies, ed. Newton Mereness(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 246.
84
Quoted in Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, 160.
85
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 417.
88
Achievements which were difficult or heroic might be admired greatly, but the true test of
whether they merited rank preference was in how they helped Cherokees. George Washington,
for example, was fairly well admired by all during the years of the early republic. Bob Thomas, a
settler who incorporated himself into Cherokee society, met the accomplished general as part of
their delegation to Philadelphia, and was asked if he was not thrilled to meet so great a man.
Cherokee attitude to age clearly was a large factor in their ranking system. The beloved
men as a group were held in high respect for their wisdom and moral character. Circumspection
and persuasion were highly valued character traits perceived to be refined and perfected
throughout one’s life, so that by the time a warrior joined the beloved men he was thought to be a
great boon to his town, and the tribe as a whole. 87 This, of course, was an expectation not always
met. Ranking in Cherokee society was ultimately based on actual results, and someone who tried
to ride expectation to a place of honor without supporting his ambitions with deeds would be
subject to ridicule, and put in his place by the community. One observation of their seating
according to rank in council noted, “Every one takes his seat, according to his reputed merit; a
worthless cox-comb dare not to be guilty of the least intrusion -- should he attempt it, he is
ordered to his proper place, before the multitude, with the vilest disgrace, and bears their stinging
laughter.” 88
Ranking in the Cherokee war party system was similar. Military organization was
relatively loose; certainly it bore little resemblance to the highly complex regimented systems of
European armies. Native warfare, which prior to European colonization had never been used for
86
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 88-89. Occanastota was a highly esteemed
Cherokee war chief.
87
Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century," 42.
88
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 421.
89
large scale annexation or by a nationalist level of ambition, did not develop the need for such
intricate controls. 89 Nevertheless, they did use rudimentary rankings, and those tended to be
highly functional. Some ranks, such as “Raven” were earned war titles and attached to specific
war roles which required a high level of skill. The Raven was a forward scout position, requiring
stealth and good judgment, and as such it also often translated into an esteemed place in non-war
ranking as well. Such connections were likely not systematized, but naturally occurred as
deemed by the admiration of the community. 90 Mankiller was another war title which was earned
by killing an enemy in combat, and carried a certain level of respect and an upper place in the
war party pecking order. The position of war chief, and his officers, on the other hand, were
elected rather than earned. The fate of the whole war party rested on their good judgment, and no
warrior wanted to have that burden fall on the shoulders of a man who might be good at killing
Cherokees and colonists tried to act appropriately according to rank when they interacted,
albeit with many misunderstandings. Since the Cherokee system of ranking was based on ability
and achievement rather than birth or wealth, they tended to view the colonial lower classes as
inept and incapable. Henry Timberlake took note of this, writing, “They are extremely proud,
despising the lower class of Europeans; and at some athletick diversions I was once present at,
they refused to match or hold conference with any but officers.” 92 This being the case, however,
it was perfectly possible for foreigners to earn their respect by proving their mettle. On one
occasion a group of colonists ventured into Cherokee territory to rescue some captives of another
allied tribe that a Cherokee war party had taken. The would-be rescuers were surrounded in the
89
Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century," 53-54.
90
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 113.
91
Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century," 67.
92
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 53.
90
home of a trader, and the first response of the Cherokees was to beat their war drum, “singing,
dancing, and pouring the utmost contempt on the English name.” When they finally attacked
however, the colonists and rescued captives put up such a spirited defense that they were unable
to get through. The result was earned respect, “The gallant behaviour of those gentlemen gained
the applause of the Cheerake -- and each soon returned in safety, without any interruption, to
Colonial elites at first expected Cherokee ranking ways to mirror their own, and much
confusion was maintained as they sought to treat with the Cherokee king and his dynasty. As
they became more acquainted with the cultural differences, they found Cherokee meritocracy
threatening to the prevailing European system of ranking by birthright. This was especially so in
that the old dynastic system was already somewhat under siege by the new merchant classes, and
wealth based status symbols were being undermined by a spreading consumer culture. 94 The
vigilante movement of the South Carolina Regulators, for example, was in part an attempt by the
backcountry elites to curtail the spread of “idle, loose, and disorderly” Indian cultural ways into
the colonial population. 95 Such fears and misunderstandings on both sides acted to further
The structural forms taken on by the English and Cherokee cultures differed from each
other dramatically. Though they sometimes had similar presuppositions, as in the case of gender
roles, the ways those manifested as social forms were nearly always unique and far from
compatible with each other. Slow acculturation was one reaction to this dissonance, but it was
attended by stresses and friction which had more immediate effects. The net result was that
though over time the two cultures grew to be less alien to each other, the mounting pressures
93
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 344.
94
Thomas Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), i-vii.
95
Richard Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1963), 47.
91
caused by cultural discontinuity outpaced acculturation and led to violent breaks in the peace.
Such breaks and their immediate catalysts tended to occur on the level of visible culture, which
Chapter Three
Thundering Bullets, Silent Arrows:
The Impact of Visible Culture
Early in the annals of Euro-Indian contact in North America, in the summer of 1609, the
French explorer Samuel de Champlain accompanied his native Huron allies to battle against a
group of Mohawk warriors. Far from the stealthy and savage ambuscade that has become
synonymous with Indian style warfare, the combat on that day was formal and ritualistic. The
Mohawks issued a challenge the preceding evening, and the two parties agreed to fight on the
next morning. The night was spent performing war dances and exchanging boasts and insults at
one another. At daybreak, the two war-bands approached each other slowly and deliberately,
adorned with wooden armor and shields, and wielding primitive weapons. Champlain, and a few
other Frenchmen with him, fired on the Mohawks with arquebuses, a technology entirely alien to
the Mohawks. The thunder of the firearms and the gaping wounds caused by the musket-balls
horrified the Mohawk warriors, who turned and fled for their lives. They may not have realized it
at the time, but warfare on the continent was about to change forever. This was an instant in time
when first contact between the old and new worlds would prove emblematic of how disruptive
The Iroquoian Hurons and Mohawks of the far north were not unique in fighting
ritualistic battles with massed ranks of warriors. The colonists at Jamestown observed much the
same among the Powhatans, and years earlier the expedition of Hernando de Soto reported
similar ways all throughout the southeast. 2 The mode of conflict was designed to allow war in
which warriors earned renown, captives could be taken, but casualties kept to a minimum.
1
Samuel de Champlain, The Works of Samuel De Champlain, vol. 2 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1922),
99-101.
2
Charles Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando De Soto and the South's Ancient
Chiefdoms (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997), 19-24; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into
Virginia Britania (1612) (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 109-110.
93
Shields and armor were extremely effective in curbing the lethality of war clubs and stone tipped
arrows, and disabled warriors were often captured rather than killed. The introduction of
gunpowder and lead bullets shattered the status quo, and forced the native tribes to adapt. 3
There is no extant record of the moment that this jarring new technology first intruded
upon the lives of the Cherokees, but that it happened is certain. When Gabriel Arthur and James
Needham encountered the Cherokees in 1673 they were already in possession of European made
muskets through barter and raiding with Indians closer to colonial settlements. 4 The important
cultural lesson is in how they changed their behavior due to the new weapons. Heavy wooden
shields and ritualized battle fell away in favor of stealth and ambush. 5 Warriors adopted guns for
their power, but also retained the bow and arrow for its silence. Contact with European culture
catalyzed change in native behavior, but the Indians did not simply begin to fight in the same
way Europeans did. Their aims in war – to earn prestige, take captives, and avoid mass casualties
– remained the same. Stealth, ambush, and quick limited raids became the Indian way of war, not
the regimented advance of massed armies like European nations practiced. Their visible culture
changed, but through adaptation rather than acculturation. Once again surface level life ways
proved malleable, while the deeper foundations and structures which shaped them resisted
change.
The reference to visible culture draws attention to the directly observable details therein.
It is composed of the overt facets of a society which are derived from the more foundational
beliefs and organizational structures already discussed. Direct actions, habits, and tangible
3
Roger Carpenter, "Making War More Lethal: Iroquois Vs. Huron (1) in the Great Lakes Region, 1609 to
1650," Michigan Historical Review 27, no. 2 (2001).
4
Abraham Wood, "Letter of Abraham Wood," in Early Travels in the Tennessee Country 1540-1800, ed.
Samuel Williams(Johnson City: The Watauga Press, 1928), 34.
5
This was not a direct replacement of one tactic with another. Both modes of battle existed before the
introduction of firearms, and the change represents the slow ritualized combat fading away in favor of stealth as
conditions altered.
94
objects characterize it, and so it is at once more accessible, more initially authentic, and also
more problematic to understand. Visible culture encompasses the aspects of Cherokee culture
that European colonists observed and interpreted, often applying only superficial judgments and
thus misunderstanding the true meanings behind them. For this reason, visible culture is
addressed last even though it is the first observed grouping of folk ways. Doing so is the reverse
of how observers actually explore culture, but also helps to avoid the difficulties of assessing
Speech Ways 6
The Cherokees were distinguished from their Southeastern Indian neighbors by a number
of features, and one of the most important was their speech ways. Linguistic unity has long been
conjured as a basis for national identity. The Cherokee were an Iroquoian speaking people
surrounded by linguistic Muskogeans. The fact that their language had more in common with the
five nations far to the north likely points to a migration to the area where Europeans found them.
The move must have already been long in the past by the seventeenth century, as evidenced by
the sharp differences between the two tongues developed over years of separation. Archaeology
also confirms that while relatively speaking the Cherokees might have been newcomers to the
region, they had inhabited the land for centuries by the time they encountered Europeans. 7
Culturally speaking, the difference in linguistic stock from their closest neighbors acted to unify
the Cherokees as a people. At the same time geography, once again, caused subdivisions within
6
Speech is, of course, not technically visible on an ocular level. The term visible culture refers not only to
that which is seen with the eye, but also to auditory, tactile, olfactory, and other facets of culture which are directly
observable via sensory experience.
7
Duane King, The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1979), 9-11.
95
the Cherokee territory in the form of regional dialects. At least three distinct dialects developed,
communication proved a more daunting challenge. Where members of different linguistic stocks
met, often a kind of “middle ground” language developed, using key words from both and even a
heavy dose of gestures to derive basic meaning. Termed “jargons,” these improvisations acted as
a way to easily exchange ideas but lacked the deeper nuances that make up sophisticated speech
ways. Throughout history most trade languages have been, or at least began as, jargons.
Cherokee country was in a central position relative to other tribes in the Southeast, so intertribal
traffic was common through the area. The fact that the Cherokees lived in the midst of peoples
who spoke a completely different tongue combined with the central location of their lands to
make jargon a common linguistic tool in their lives. It is entirely natural that when white
Europeans began to deal with the Cherokees that they too communicated primarily through a
form of jargon. While useful for simple exchange and conveying general ideas, trade languages
were a poor fit for anything more complex and proved a fertile ground for misunderstandings
and even derision. Europeans, once familiar with the jargon, tended to think of themselves as
well acquainted with the native language and imagined that the Indians were intellectually
deficient for having such a poor tongue, or else that they purposefully obscured their language
One area where Cherokee speech ways differed markedly from those of the various
8
One noticeable differentiation when reading transcriptions is the l-r substitution between lower and
overhill speakers. The overhill town of Tellico, for example, is often written “Terrico” when the speaker was from
the lower towns in accordance with his pronunciation. See James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1902), 189.
9
Narratives of New Netherland (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), 128.
96
contentious issue became the subject of conversation. With the Cherokee ideal of consensus and
avoiding non-essential confrontation, silence was their way to be non committal in an argument
rather than to forcefully offer rebuttal. Silence was a form of censure, or at least of passively
demonstrating disagreement. This could be frustrating for both native and colonist because the
white man often took such silence as assent and the Indian felt he was being ignored. Body
language ways were also at odds. According to Henry Timberlake, “they seldom turn their eyes
on the person they speak of, or address themselves to, and are always suspicious when peoples'
eyes are fixed on them.” 10 Cherokees thus often saw colonists as far too garrulous in manner, and
This being the case, it was disconcerting for a white man to be told by a normally taciturn
Cherokee that he was a liar, a discourtesy certain to herald a duel in many circles back in polite
European society. Such an occurrence was not the result of actual rudeness or of an
uncharacteristic bellicosity, but came from actual conceptual discordance between Cherokee and
Anglo-American speech ways. In this case, where white men drew a sharp distinction between
an intentional untruth, or lie, and simple misinformation, the Cherokee did not, and “lie” was the
word used by the Indian for both. One Anglo-American complained of this, saying, “As there is
no alternative between a falsehood and a lie, they usually tell any person, in plain language, ‘you
lie,’ as a friendly negative to a reputed truth.” 11 Small scale verbal confusion like this could
cause minor individual incidents and generally widen the gulf between Indian and colonist, but
the most impactful of these was the difference in conceptual frameworks surrounding land
10
Henry Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake (Cherokee: Museum of the Cherokee Indian
Press, 2007), 30.
11
James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London: E. & C. Dilly, 1775), 104.
97
Both the Cherokees and the colonists were familiar with the idea of purchasing land, but
what they meant by that were two very different things. Wahnenauhi’s manuscript, part of a
collection of Cherokee cultural values compiled by the Bureau of American Ethnology, provides
a crucial insight. According to Wahnenauhi, “It is an established principle with the Cherokees, in
common with all Indians, that Air, Water and Land is the free gift of the Creator to all men, and
when Land is traded it is always understood that only the right to use it is meant.” 12 This
explains why land sales to colonists, especially early ones, were so easily obtained. Both
Cherokees and emigrants agreed to the sale, but they understood it to mean different things.
Thus, both sides were liable to feel betrayed when disagreements inevitably arose as white
These examples illustrate how the language barrier was even more difficult a challenge to
overcome than just learning new grammar and vocabulary. Indian and colonist alike had to cope
with the mismatching concepts and thought patterns they held, and how those caused
misunderstandings when translated into speech. Often enough the sum result was confusion at
best, and insulted sensibilities (which could escalate to open hostility) at worst.
Order Ways
Cherokee speech ways also had a surprisingly strong part to play in how they kept social
chaos at bay. Any society requires a set of mechanisms to keep order, and the Cherokees were no
different. Though their strong adherence to the ethos of individual liberty and the non-use of
coercive force made keeping order a somewhat complex undertaking, they nonetheless tackled it
in their own unique manner. As in nearly all of their culture ways, the Cherokees based their
12
Wahnenauhi, "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," in Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, ed. Jack
Kilpatrick and Anna Kilpatrick(Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 194.
98
peacekeeping methods in the foundational structures of kinship and community. Because force
was eschewed, they required an instrument of a less blunt nature to keep the masses of
individuals from breaking out in anarchistic confusion. The chief tool they settled on was well
Even in verbal shaming, however, a delicate touch was applied rather than ham-fisted
rebuke. 13 The ideal of harmony meant that Cherokees avoided even mere verbal confrontations
when possible, and they softly approached efforts to keep unpopular behavior at bay. This is not
to say that they were ineffective or even pleasant, merely subtle. A cutting sarcasm was leveled
against wrongdoers with what have been called “sweetened darts” of verbal correction. This
There are many petty crimes which their young people are guilty of, -- to which
our laws annex severe punishment, but their's only an ironical way of jesting.
They commend the criminal before a large audience, for practising the virtue,
opposite to the crime, that he is known to be guilty of. If it is for theft, they praise
his honest principles; and they commend a warrior for having behaved valiantly
against the enemy, when he acted cowardly; they introduce the minutest
circumstances of the affair, with severe sarcasms which wound deeply. I have
known them to strike their delinquents with those sweetened darts, so good
naturedly and skilfully, that they would sooner die by torture, than renew their
shame by repeating the actions. 14
This form of correction was especially effective because Cherokees were so bound to their
communities and because power was attained only through goodwill and communal approbation.
This combined with the higher priority Cherokees put on esteem and prestige to make for a
powerful deterrent against acting inappropriately. The disapproval of highly venerated beloved
men in particular was to be avoided. Butrick reported that at their festivals a single word from an
honored priest was enough to curtail any rowdiness, “if, by chance, any conversation took a cast
13
John Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee (Knoxville: Heiskell & Brown, 1823),
254.
14
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 429-430.
99
they thought objectionable, even the highest among the priests gave no reproachful check, but
simply remarked ‘Yay-lee-quawh,’ ‘That will do,’ or ‘That is enough’; and never without
effect.” 15
The one instance in which the Cherokees did embrace the use of force was in the
punishment of murderers. Even in this, however, one cannot find a central policing authority
other than the kinship systems. The laws against murder were enforced by, and incumbent upon,
the clans. The murder victim’s clan served justice on the offenders, and punishment took the
form of “an eye for an eye.” Interestingly, the affair was clan wide on both sides, so an avenger
could justly kill any member of the murderer’s clan in payment for the crime, theoretically
leaving the perpetrator himself untouched. 16 This aspect lent a strong peer pressure factor to the
system’s preventative side; a would-be murderer who was unconcerned with his own life might
think twice if his crime might endanger the lives of his family members. 17 Long tradition deeply
ingrained the right to retaliation in Cherokee society, and so such a killing was considered
justified. 18 This meant that clan members never retaliated against a justified killing in turn, which
prevented a vicious cycle of blood feuds. 19 Because vengeance came at the hand of the victim’s
clan members, not belonging to a clan was an extreme liability. Unadopted slaves, such as the
atsi nahsa'i 20 were at risk because there was no deterrent to killing them outright. Foreigners
travelling through Cherokee country faced the same dangers, relying on the promise of
15
John Payne and Daniel Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010), 58.
16
John Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New York
University Press, 1970), 80.
17
Those at risk were clan members, so a Cherokee’s father and other paternal relatives were not at risk
because of the matrilineal clan structure.
18
This may seem harsh, and it was, but common sense was never far from Cherokee order ways. Though it
does not appear to have been the norm, in some cases gifts of skins and beads could be offered to the aggrieved clan
in substitution for a life, and bloodshed averted that way.
19
Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation, 78.
20
Literally: “one who is owned.”
100
retaliation by their own people as protection from any bloodthirsty rogues. Many of the wars
Relations between the Cherokees and English were complicated. Their close trade
relationship and the “chain of friendship” between them acted almost as a de facto adoption. 21
Cherokee leaders tended to treat the English colonies like a clan, fully invested with the right to
justified vengeance, but neither side fully understood the other’s system of justice which led to
massive misunderstandings and ill will. Governor Lyttleton of South Carolina, for example,
wrote to the head men of the Middle Towns that he was sorrowful over the murder of some of
their people by colonists, but that they had escaped and might not be found. He continued,
stating that it was impossible for them to punish the innocent for the guilty, and that in that case
the Cherokees would have to be satisfied with no retribution at all. 22 This made no sense to the
Cherokees, with their expectation that the whole clan (or in this case, colony) be held liable for
the actions of the murderers. Mirroring that, the immediate cause of the Anglo-Cherokee War
was that the English demanded that the perpetrators of murders against settlers be turned over,
and would except no substitutions except the guilty parties themselves. This was clearly
In cases less serious than murder, where the Cherokees were apt to use their “sweetened
darts” instead of physical force, more covert forms of deterioration accumulated from the
differences between Indian and English order ways. For the Cherokees, correction was an
informal matter judged and dealt with by common sense. This stood in stark contrast to the
21
This relationship was always a bit shaky and was never very well defined. Cherokee behavior vacillated
between treating the colonies in ways appropriate for separated clans and foreign peoples. It may be that adoption
was intended by various leaders and councils, but never took root within the tribe as a whole.
22
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: 1754-1765, ed. William Mcdowell (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1970), 480.
23
A copy of the document can be found in "Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Concluded by His
Excellency," South Carolina Gazette, January 8, 1760 .
101
formalized and unbending legal system of the British Empire. To the Cherokees, the huge
collection of almost indecipherable laws signaled corruption rather than justice. One Indian
trader described their attitude this way, “They say, if our laws were honest, or wisely framed,
they would be plain and few, that the poor people might understand and remember them, as well
as the rich.” 24 Both Cherokee and English saw each other as holding to unjust practices. Clearly
this had the potential to cause immense animosity, and the negative stereotypes it spawned of
Building Ways
Another very visible part of culture has to do with the actual physical structures a society
builds. Cherokee building ways and architecture were intrinsically tied to their communal town
structure. Their methods were extremely functional and suited to the needs of a tight knit
community. The relatively recent availability of iron or steel tools through European trade made
procuring building materials much easier in the eighteenth century even though materials were
usually more roughshod and primitive than those of refined European tastes. Logs, bark, clay,
and dry grass were their chief stock, excluding more processed materials such as planed lumber
or dressed stone. This may well have better served their propensity to shift town sites on a semi
regular basis as farmland was depleted and renewed, requiring less labor to rebuild at a new
location. In 1761 Lieutenant Timberlake noted the great number of tools English trade
introduced to the nation, and predicted that they would soon become quite proficient in their
use. 25 He was quite correct, in that many Cherokees adopted western building ways and built
24
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 434.
25
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 32.
102
large colonial style plantation houses in the early nineteenth century. For a long period, however,
native architecture persisted, and colonial visitors often noted its ingenuity and peculiarities.
Cherokee households built two primary living structures, one for warm weather and
another “hot house” for the winter months. William Bartram described the summer house as
oblong, constructed of logs notched at the ends and fixed together, much like the iconic log
cabins adopted by white frontiersmen. They were plastered for insulation with clay and grass.
According to Bartram the preferred roofing was bark or shingles from the chestnut tree. Inside,
the Cherokees divided their houses into three rooms connected by doors, which Bartram noted
was different from the layout used by their southern Creek neighbors. 26 The construction of the
roof limited the houses to around 16 feet in width, but they could be quite long, often
approaching around 60 feet. The hot houses were smaller and built to retain heat. They were
circular with a conical roof, having an aperture at the top to let out the smoke from a low burning
fire built in the center of the chamber. Clay insulation was applied far more liberally to the hot
houses. A low narrow door permitted entrance, and the interior was described as “full of hot,
smoky darkness.” 27
By all accounts Cherokee homes served as a space primarily identified with the female,
belonging to her in case of divorce within the matrilocal marriage context of Cherokee culture.
Many men often preferred spending time in the common area of the town house even when in
town, and may often have only made nocturnal visits to their wives’ houses. 28 Even for women,
however, the house does not appear to have been as important in determining identity as the
European style “homestead.” Part of this may have been a consequence of the less materialistic
26
William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram (New York: Facsimile Library, 1940), 296.
27
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 421.
28
Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998), 46.
103
culture the Cherokees held to in relation to the colonial custom. Less material goods and
therefore less need of a place to store and treasure them would make one’s house less important
as a defining characteristic. Lack of land inheritance and the fact of periodic town relocation no
doubt also contributed. This does not mean that houses served little purpose for the Cherokees,
even for their men. Archaeological evidence points to a wide array of activities assigned to
different areas of homes, both male and female. 29 Food preparation, tool making, rest, and
The town house, which formed the central edifice of the Cherokee town in structure and
civics, was built much like the hot house, but on a grand scale. Often Cherokees built the town
house on the foundation of a far older ritual mound, and from a distance it resembled a small
mountain, conical in shape and covered in earthen clay. The structure was built of three
concentric circles of support pillars, the outer ring starting at a mere six feet tall, but growing
taller to the center of the great rotunda where a very tall central pillar reached up to the pinnacle
of the roof. This point was typically fifteen to twenty feet high according to Butrick. 30 Bartram
described a ring of stepped seating surrounding a central fire, which he said was kept at an
optimal size to provide light and heat yet little smoke. 31 Timberlake described the town house
interior at Chota as having the appearance of an ancient amphitheatre, and being large enough to
contain 500 persons. He found it uncomfortably dark and said the ventilation was so poor that
The town house served as the social and political center of the community. It was the
gathering place for councils and celebrations as well as the common area for public intercourse
29
Ramie Gougeon, “Household Research at the Late Mississippian Little Egypt Site (9mu102)” (University
of Georgia, 2002), 145-172.
30
John Payne and Daniel Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010), 436.
31
Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, 297-298.
32
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 17.
104
and entertaining guests. In accordance with its civic purposes, many Cherokee town houses were
not actually circular, but seven sided so that the aligned seven tiers of seating sections
corresponded to the seven clans which made up their social structure. 33 The town house was
open as a shelter and sleeping area for any travelers passing through or for townspeople who
were destitute and in need of support. As such it reflected the Cherokee ideal of high hospitality,
by which very often the town house was not necessary as a lodging place, especially for
infrequent guests, as such visitors were apt to be invited to stay in the home of the chief or some
other resident. 34
Perhaps another architectural evidence of Cherokee largess was the “treasure house”
Butrick reported to stand just west of the town house, where the people would deposit meat and
produce for public feasts and for the priests. William Bartram also noted this building, and
But previous to their carrying off their crops from the field, there is a large crib or
granary, erected in the plantation, which is called the king’s crib; and to this each
family carries and deposits a certain quantity, according to his ability or
inclination, or none at all if he so chooses… to which every citizen has the right
of free and equal access, when his own private stores are consumed; to serve as a
surplus to fly to for succour; to assist neighbouring towns, whose crops may have
failed; accommodate strangers, or travelers. 35
Another important aspect of Cherokee building ways was their fortifications and
Mississippian palisaded townships of the sort encountered by Hernando De Soto in his early
expedition through the continent. 36 An early visitor to the Overhill town of Chota described its
fortifications “the cliffs of the river on the one side being very high for its defence, the other
33
Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989), 106-108.
34
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 180.
35
Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, 401.
36
Wayne Lee, "Fortify, Fight, or Flee: Tuscarora and Cherokee Defensive Warfare and Military Culture
Adaptation," The Journal of Military History 68, no. 3 (2004), 748.
105
three sides trees of two foot over, pitched on end, twelve feet high, and on the tops scaffolds
placed with parapets to defend the walls and offend their enemies which men stand on to
fight.” 37 In 1725 Colonel Chicken visited the adjacent towns of Little Tellico and Great Tellico,
and described their condition as “both Enforted and the houses which they live in all Muskett
proof.” 38 In the town of Chagee he found a substantial fort built inside the town around the town
house, with a “slight ffortification” around the town proper. 39 At Estatoe the Colonel reported
even more substantial defenses, including a fort around the town house as at Chagee, as well as
the town itself being “well ffortifyed all round with Punchins and also ditched on the Outside of
the sd Punchins (wch Ditch) is Stuck full of light wood Spikes so that if the Enemy should ever
happen to fall therein, they must without doubt receive a great deal of Damage by those
Spikes.” 40
The Cherokees did not universally fortify their towns so strongly. Border towns which
could expect more frequent attack from an enemy were typically palisaded, while settlements
closer to the interior of Cherokee territory were left without such walls. 41 This pattern applied to
the armored houses Chicken saw at Tellico as well, which were further described by later
visitors. In such “barrier towns” the Cherokees cut what Adair called portholes into the walls of
the houses in order to shoot at any enemies who penetrated the palisade and got within the
town. 42 This defensive structure directly mirrors the pattern used by the Mississippian natives of
37
Wood, "Letter of Abraham Wood,", 28.
38
George Chicken, "Journal of Colonel George Chicken's Mission from Charlestown," in Travels in the
American Colonies, ed. Newton Mereness(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 112.
39
Ibid., 149.
40
Ibid., 150. Chota and Tellico were in the mountains of Tennessee, not far from North Carolina. Chota
was located on the Little Tennessee River, and Little and Great Tellico south of there, halfway to the Hiwassee
River. Both Estatoe and Chagee were in the Lower Town grouping, near where the present day borders of North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia meet.
41
Lee, "Fortify, Fight, or Flee: Tuscarora and Cherokee Defensive Warfare and Military Culture
Adaptation," 756.
42
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 419.
106
Mabila against De Soto in 1540. 43 As the eighteenth century progressed, the Cherokees adapted
to European style warfare and the diminished effectiveness of their fortifications by turning the
relative disposability of their homes into a defensive feature, choosing to leave the structures
behind and adopt a strategy of avoidance and wilderness mobility rather than risking all-or-
Building ways are a refreshing facet of culture where Cherokee and English folk ways
were different without causing significant tensions. It is true that colonists looked down on
primitive Indian building ways in comparison to their own, seeing the contrast as a sign of their
own cultural superiority. 44 Because life ways are so interconnected however, many of the
features seen in Cherokee buildings reflect other cultural trends more troublesome for harmony.
Aspects of Cherokee homes relating to matrilocal family culture, for example, reveal cultural
differences with the English which were not necessarily divisive on their own, but built on
deeper differences which were contentious. Likewise, the features of their defensive building
ways serve as a portal into understanding Cherokee war ways, which proved to be the source of
War Ways
a developed war tradition. Indeed, the southeast Indians were no strangers to conflict. War was a
constant threat, as well as a constant opportunity and occupation for gaining glory and captives.
In the early eighteenth century, when colonists tried to broker peace between the Cherokees and
the Tuscaroras, they were rebuffed on the grounds that, “we cannot live without war. Should we
43
Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando De Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms,
238.
44
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 418.
107
make peace with the Tuscaroras with whom we are at war, we must immediately look out for
some other, with whom we can be engaged in our beloved occupation.” 45 This need for warfare
was driven by the warriors’ hunger for status and war names rather than by ambitions of
conquest or empire. 46
Such motivations may well have been in operation during earlier eras of Indian history,
but post-Columbian North America saw a much depleted native population and war served
different ends. 47 Those ends were, as mentioned, acclaim and social prestige, but that was merely
a starting point. Once an attack was made, war continued in a vicious cycle of vengeance and
retaliation. Women played a large role in the continuation of wars, as any person killed by an
enemy, whether defending or attacking, was likely to be mourned by their female relatives who
would usually call for the town’s warriors to retaliate in kind. Their grief could be eased in three
major ways through war. The first, and most straightforward, was merely “an eye for an eye,” or
in this case, “a scalp for a scalp.” 48 The Cherokee ethos of hospitality and that of seeking
harmony within their society was mirrored by a dark thirst for bloody revenge against their
enemies. War captives provided a second, and perhaps even more satisfying reprisal in ritualized
torture, humiliation, and death by burning. Finally, war captives could sometimes be adopted
into the tribe, “replacing” the lost son or daughter. This was particularly utilized after periods of
heavy losses in order to replace vital population levels. In all three cases women instigated and
reaped the final results: warriors offered up scalps to mourning wives and mothers, and it was
45
Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, 237-238.
46
Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation, 153-154.
47
The population dense settlements encountered by De Soto in 1539 consisted of diverse chiefdoms and
“paramount chiefdoms” which extended pseudo-suzerainty over their neighbors through military might. Extreme
depopulation from European diseases in the following century vastly changed this social situation.
48
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 150.
108
women who played the lead roles in both torture and in adoptions. 49 For men, the attraction of
warrior’s weapons were chiefly the war club, the bow and arrow, and at times a knife, spear, or
sling. The absence of metals meant that arrowheads were usually of flint, and the blunt war club
predominated over edged weapons. Such armaments were countered by armor stitched together
from thick buffalo hides, and shields of tough wood or leather to protect the face against
arrows. 51 After contact with Europeans was well underway, new martial technologies introduced
into native culture made thick leather armor and cumbersome shields nearly ineffective. Bullets
and gunpowder, of course, completely bypassed any protection they might have offered, but so
too did metal arrowheads which were adopted even earlier than muskets by Indian tribes. 52
Before colonists were willing to trade guns to them, Cherokees and other tribes began making
brass and iron arrowheads by breaking down metal pots and kettles acquired through trade. The
result was an evolution in Indian warfare to a mode favoring lightly equipped, fast moving, and
stealthy ambuscade over en masse confrontations. During the eighteenth century the war club
gave way to the metal tomahawk, and warriors added the musket to the bow and arrow for range.
They eschewed cumbersome armor in favor of light leathers, or even near nakedness for ease of
movement. The power of the gun was balanced by the useful silence of the bow, and so very
often Cherokee warriors carried both in order to widen their range of martial options. 53
Preparing for offensive war was an involved process. As stated, men often took to the
warpath at the instigation of a town’s women, but ultimately the decision of whether or not to
49
Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835, 53.
50
Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, 239.
51
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 40-41.
52
Carpenter, "Making War More Lethal: Iroquois Vs. Huron (1) in the Great Lakes Region, 1609 to 1650,",
15.
53
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 18-19.
109
form a raiding party fell to the individual warriors. 54 Perhaps the most important of these were
the war chief and his lieutenant, who consulted together when war was proposed to make a
decision; at their call, many warriors were likely to rally. 55 Raiding parties could certainly form
without their consent, but were likely to result in small scale actions rather than the all out war
which these respected war leaders could inspire. Once the decision to march out was made a
great war whoop ensued, and warriors from all over the town and surrounding settlements began
to muster at the town house. At this point, they began a period of ritual fasting and prayers in
order to purify themselves, along with abstinence from sexual intercourse, all of which they
believed would result in certain victory. Success in war was always connected in the Indian mind
They have no such phrase as the "fortune of war" They reckon the leader's
impurity to be the chief occasion of bad success; and if he lose several of his
warriors by the enemy, his life is either in danger for the supposed fault, or he is
degraded, by taking from him his drum, war-whistle, and martial titles, and
debasing him to his boy's name, from which he is to rise by a fresh gradation. 56
Thus, praying, sacrificing, and fasting prior to treading the warpath was of preeminent
importance to the Cherokees. They chose one of their priests to serve the expedition as war
priest, and he prepared a sacred “war ark” of either a wood or earthen container and covered by
seven deerskins to carry with the war party. In it, the priest stored some of the “holy fire” that
was kept burning in the town house, as well as other implements which must have been of
religious significance. When the war party set out, the priest made a sacrifice of a deer’s tongue
in the fire to secure the protection of the spirits. Divinations were often made as well, to
54
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 36.
55
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 243-244.
56
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 388.
57
Ibid., 120, 161-164; Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 144-145.
110
Their devout adherence to keeping pure continued on the warpath. Each warrior paid
close attention to his dreams while out to war, and at the slightest sign of ill omen in his
dreaming he was apt to return home, feeling that it was a warning from some spirit. His fellows,
both in the war party and at home, did not look upon this as any form of cowardice or shame, but
as prudence and the correct course of action. In addition to this precaution, the warriors practiced
a strict form of asceticism to maintain their purity while en route to whatever town they were
attacking. They were prohibited from speaking about any common or trifling matters, and
especially about women. If anyone trod on a stick or branch and broke it, he was obliged to carry
it with him until they encamped for the night. Food and drink was distributed by one warrior, the
“Etiffu,” or “waiter,” and was often scanty at best, making for a kind of semi-fasting to better
maintain purity. 58 James Adair once accompanied a war party, and carried a hollow cane filled
with drink in order to quench his thirst when no one was watching. 59
The Cherokee method of war reflected a wider paradigm which spanned all of the North
American Indian tribes. This was that nationalism never really developed among them, and
warfare for the purposes of annexation and political control was unknown. War was a means to
gain vengeance, to attain prestige, and occasionally to capture and adopt new tribe members in
order to replace lost population. As a result, Cherokee war parties were not tightly regimented
and did not wage war in a way familiar to European militaries. This is because their aims were
different. 60 Instead of massing together and waging systematic campaigns to destroy their
enemies’ capability to resist and in order to secure land, Cherokee war parties attempted to
stealthily cut off individuals from their fellows and kill or capture them without risk.
58
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 147.
59
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 383.
60
Fred Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century,"
American Anthropological Association 64, no. 5 (1962), 53-54.
111
A raid on an enemy town relied on stealth and a quick strike; if the enemy was
forewarned the attack was likely to be abandoned as a lost cause. Sieges in the European sense
were unknown. 61 Sometimes attackers would stay “skulking” in the woods around a town,
hoping that the defenders would drop their guard or that someone would venture out to a
vulnerable position. 62 When a war party did elect to fight another force, their preferred tactic was
that of ambush, sending out a few members ahead as bait, and the rest laying in wait in an acute
V formation to catch their enemies in a deadly crossfire. 63 Though savage against its individual
victims, this method of warfare did not result in gratuitous slaughter, and on the attacker’s part
any losses were considered very bad. For this reason war parties traveled near swampy terrain
when they could, to better afford escape if they were discovered, and war leaders preferred
calling the retreat to risking any likely loss of their warriors’ lives (even when facing an inferior
force). 64
The cultural disconnect between colonial and Cherokee war ways was a major source of
friction. The Cherokee war objective of killing or capturing nearby vulnerable individuals meant
that white settlers near the borders were at considerable risk. European armies, more concerned
with securing strategic locations and fighting other armies, might harass nearby households by
confiscating food and supplies, but were far less likely to subject them to violence. Such would
not contribute to European style war aims and would be contrary to the ethos of “gentlemanly
war.” Cherokee war parties, on the other hand, operated in an exactly opposite manner, which
61
The Cherokees did learn about European style siege in the Tuscarora War, but almost universally
adhered to their own style of warfare thereafter, even with the adoption of European weaponry. Only out of absolute
necessity did they attempt a more European kind of siege in dealing with Fort Loudoun (which was dangerously
deep in their core territory) during the Anglo-Cherokee War.
62
Lee, "Fortify, Fight, or Flee: Tuscarora and Cherokee Defensive Warfare and Military Culture
Adaptation," 720-721.
63
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 1, 255.
64
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 386.
112
sowed terror in the hearts of colonial settlements. As long as the Cherokees adhered to this style
Cherokees held colonial war methods in contempt. Since they did not value political
lordship, European methods of attaining it seemed wasteful and pointless. In 1758, for example,
large numbers of Cherokee warriors flocked to Virginia to honor the call to war against the
French by their English allies. General John Forbes was in command of the campaign to retake
Fort Duquesne, and at the time it was very much a matter of “hurry up and wait.” The English
used Cherokee warriors for scouting and as auxiliary soldiers, but delays kept the whole army in
place for months at a time. This extended inactivity was a ludicrous state of affairs to the
Cherokee mind, and many of them abandoned the field in contempt of the English martial
tradition. Forbes recounted as much in his correspondence, writing, “We had very nearly lost all
our Cherokees… for the want of artillery did not afford us to show any design to attack the
enemy or defend ourselves.” 65 Virginian authorities eventually cajoled more Cherokee warriors
into service, but as the conflict dragged on things continued to deteriorate. Forbes met the
Cherokee distaste for his style of warfare with contempt of his own. He sought to bring them to
heel with an iron fist, and even thought he had been successful four months later when he wrote,
“our Indians I have at last brought to reason by treating them as they always ought to be, with the
greatest signs of scorning indifference and disdain.” 66 The ill wisdom of this approach was
proven just months later, as such treatment catalyzed the chain of incidents which led to the
Anglo-Cherokee War and cost numerous colonial and Cherokee lives in South Carolina. War
ways thus strained the relationship between the two peoples even when they were fighting on the
same side.
65
John Forbes, Writings of General John Forbes Relating to His Service in North America (New York:
Arno Press, 1971), 109.
66
Ibid., 244.
113
Sport Ways
Cherokee sport ways are best considered as a smaller, localized, nonlethal (usually)
iteration of their war ethos. Outside of warfare, sport was one of the main ways Cherokees had to
earn prestige and acclaim, and stiff competition existed between rival towns on the regional
level, as well as between individuals within a local town. Sport was physical, and emphasized the
skills used in warfare, making it a kind of proving grounds where young warriors could train for
“the real thing” with minimal risk. Their chief sport, termed “ball play,” was even sometimes
called the friend or companion of battle, being considered something like its smaller sibling. For
this reason, ball play could be used as a metaphor or euphemism for war, as illustrated by part of
the previously mentioned Cherokee Kana’ti myth where the primordial father arranges for the
wolf men to kill his two sons for their crime in slaying their own mother,
When the Wolf chief asked him his business, he said: "I have two bad boys at
home, and I want you to go in seven days from now and play ball against them."
Although Kana'ti spoke as though he wanted them to play a game of ball, the
Wolves knew that he meant for them to go and kill the two boys. 67
Ball play was the precursor to the modern sport of lacrosse, and was played using a
leather ball and hickory ball sticks. Goals were placed at either end of a large field by setting up
a pair of stakes, and the game was played to twelve points. Competition was fierce, and play
proceeded with little precautions taken against injury. Indeed, broken and dislocated bones were
not uncommon. The areas chosen for the games were suited to accommodate many spectators, as
these were big community events. 68 Though the players carried the greatest weight of potential
earned or lost prestige, the pride of both towns as a whole was also on the line. Spectators further
67
Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 245.
68
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 62-63.
114
brought that back down to their own individual persons by placing large bets on the outcome of
When the men of a town wished to have a ball play, they sent messengers to the town
they wanted to play against, and the head men with respect to ball plays arranged a time and
place. Because the stakes were so high, and the whole affair so closely approximated actual
warfare, the preparations for a match also closely resembled those for a war party. The players
sequestered themselves for seven days prior to the match, during which they abstained from
contact with women, ate a restricted diet, and participated in ritual washings, dances, and
divinations in order to ensure their success on the field. As in actual battle, the Cherokees
believed that the side which attained the best purity would be victorious. According to Butrick,
“anciently ball players must be men of good character, who play honorably, without fraud or
In addition to these large, inter-town games, the Cherokee played a variety of other more
casual sports, some using the leather ball and others not. Though women did not participate
directly in the ball play described above, they may have played the same game on a smaller scale
among themselves, as well as in other active pastimes, sometimes with other women and others
along with men. 71 Lieutenant Timberlake greatly enjoyed the spectacle of ball play, including
those by men and women, writing, “I was not a little pleased with their ball-plays (in which they
shew great dexterity) especially when the women played, who pulled one another about, to the
no small amusement of an European spectator.” 72 Another popular game was called chunkey, in
which one or two players, rolling a smoothly carved stone disk (called a chunkey stone) along a
69
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 400-401.
70
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 43-44.
71
Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835, 181-182.
72
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 41.
115
well prepared play area, threw eight foot long poles with the object of striking the ground nearest
to where the stone would come to rest. The game could go on for hours, and was partially a test
of endurance. It was of ancient origin, and the stones themselves were prized by the town almost
Admiring European observers of Cherokee sport ways such as Timberlake did not reflect
the prevailing sentiment among colonial settlers. Colonists tended to spend most of their efforts
working the ground and less on honing their militia skills, so having nearby Indians whose
leisure practices were tantamount to military drills in disguise was disconcerting. While
appreciation of the physical prowess and ability of Cherokee sportsmen may have existed,
nearby settlers certainly would have preferred that their native neighbors pass the time doing
something that looked far less like practice for the next bloody raid on their villages! The Anglo-
Cherokee War only intensified such sentiments, particularly as local militia proved unable to
hold back the Cherokee warriors, and required the intervention of imperial military regiments to
win the conflict. A significant aspect of the fallout from this was the increasing aspiration among
white settlers to “reduce the Indian to civility,” so that Cherokee men would spend the bulk of
their time plowing the fields rather than playing ball or chunkey, or, worse yet, actually on the
warpath.
Another cultural conflict arising from sport ways came from the Cherokee use of horses.
After the Anglo-Cherokee War, horse stealing became a popular diversion for warriors, and a
major complaint against them from the settlers and traders they targeted. While this may have
resembled a game in some sense, the stealing itself was not really a part of the Cherokee sport
tradition, and troubles arising from theft cannot be wholly laid at the feet of cultural differences.
Sport does enter the picture however, on the colonial side of things; horsemanship was
73
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 402.
116
considered by the European higher classes as a part of their own exclusive sport ways, an elite
pastime not to be enjoyed by their inferiors. Cherokees stealing common farm horses was a
minor irritation, but backcountry elites (often “newly minted,” so to speak, and with a chip on
their shoulder) could not countenance low savages appropriating their horses or taking up
horsemanship as their own sport. 74 Reducing the Cherokees to civility meant not only keeping
them from warlike sports, but also keeping them out of the exclusive sport ways of the noble
class.
Food Ways
The Cherokees subsisted on both plants and meat from a variety of different sources. On
the main, providing meat was a task which fell to the men of the tribe, and was fulfilled by
hunting and fishing; grains, fruits, and vegetables were largely provided by the women who
tended to the fields and gardens as well as foraged for wild produce. This fourfold provisioning
was a gender balanced affair, composed of farming, foraging, hunting, and fishing. The hunt was
especially important during the cold season, and farming during the warmer months, but the
Cherokees preserved all their foodstuffs by drying or other methods so that their diet would
Cherokee agriculture focused on three main crops, colloquially known among the
southeast Indian groups as “the three sisters:” corn, beans, and squash. These three fulfilled an
important part of the Cherokees’ dietary needs, particularly corn, as evidenced by the
prominence of corn in their religious ways. Nutritionally, corn and beans complement each other
particularly well, combining to provide complete proteins. To these two they added squash,
74
Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths : Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 182.
117
which was a productive crop, and easily preserved for leaner months. Pumpkins and summer
squash were sometimes dried in strips for travel provisions, but even unprocessed they would
keep for long periods if kept in a cool location. The “three sisters” were grown together in the
same plot, with the vines of the beanstalks often twining around the corn. 75 They did not have
vast sweeping fields of single crops like Europeans, but rather smaller plots tended by single
families in which, as noted, the crops were all grown together. Bartram observed such fields
during his visit in 1776, describing them as “little plantations of young Corn Beans, &c, divided
from each other by narrow strips or borders of grass, which marked the bounds of each one’s
property, their habitation standing in the midst.” 76 This arrangement greatly lengthened the
lifespan of the farmland, since the beans, which replace soil nitrogen, balanced the corn, which
The Cherokees, and other North American Indians for that matter, do not appear to have
made use of any fertilizers, popular stories about Squanto and burying fish with corn seeds
notwithstanding. 77 Although planting corn and beans together did prolong field use, the
Cherokees were obliged to periodically relocate in order to keep their crops productive. In doing
so, they developed a circulating pattern of slow town migration, giving fields from ten to twenty
years to lie fallow, replenishing their nutrients. The rich soil and easy irrigation of the riverine
terrain in Cherokee country made this process viable. 78 Nonetheless, Cherokee agriculture was
insufficient to feed the tribe by itself. The other three methods of provision were needed to
75
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 406, 409.
76
Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, 284.
77
Squanto lived for many years among Europeans before returning to the American continent for his
encounter with the New England Separatists. It is likely that he learned this particular method of fertilization abroad
from white men, before teaching the European technique back to the unprepared European colonists. See Lynn Ceci,
"Fish Fertilizer: A Native North American Practice?," Science 188, (1975), 26-30.
78
Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, 288; Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knocksville:
The University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 290-291. Cherokee country (largely the Appalachia region where the
Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee come together) was riddled with rivers and creeks which supplied ample
irrigation and laid down fertile soil deposits.
118
supply a comfortable existence; as noted when Wahnenauhi recounts that plentiful game meant
The hunt was primarily a winter affair for two reasons. First, it was needed to bridge the
gap in the growing season, as crops were not being harvested and a new source of food was
necessary. Second, game proved to give a particularly rich yield of meat during the winter. Adair
commented on this. “The deer are very fat in winter, by reason of the great quantities of
chesnuts, and various sorts of acorns, that cover the boundless woods.” 80 Venison probably made
up the majority of the meat in their diet, but it was joined by bear meat, as well as that from a
variety of lesser game animals. Turkeys, geese, ducks, and other birds provided a significant
source of meat, and were often hunted using a blowdart. According to Timberlake, the children
Fish were another plentiful source of food for the Cherokees. On a small scale, they used
spears and fishhooks made of deer and turkey bones to catch them from the streams, sometimes
setting up elaborate “trot lines” spanning from bank to bank supporting multiple hooks which
could be checked several times a day. Spearing fish from canoes was another method often
employed, for which the Cherokees made implements from bamboo like cane, sharpened to a
point and hardened in the fire. Their manner of spear fishing was described as being done “with
much pleasure and ease.” 82 For a larger take, the Indians were known to sometimes poison whole
pools of fish using buckeye or “devil’s shoestring” root, which killed the fish without corrupting
79
Wahnenauhi, "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," 193.
80
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 415-416.
81
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 23.
82
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 404.
119
their meat. 83 Another method of catching large amounts of fish at once was the use of funnels or
Building two walls obliquely down the river from either shore, just as they are
near joining, a passage is left to a deep well or reservoir; the Indians then scaring
the fish down the river, close the mouth of the reservoir with a large bush or
bundle made on purpose, and it is no difficult matter to take them with baskets,
when inclosed with- in so small a compass. 84
The wilderness environment of Cherokee country itself served as a final source of food
for the tribe. A vast number of nuts, roots, berries, canes, and wild fruits were readily available
for gathering by a diligent forager. Timberlake was delighted by the richness of the produce the
forests contained, but mistakenly thought that the Cherokees made little use of it, “The woods
likewise abound with fruits and flowers, to which the Indians pay little regard.” 85 Butrick
however, who lived among them for a longer span, was more thorough in his observations. He
published a list of eleven major ingredients the Cherokees gleaned from the wilderness, from
The meals they produced from these ingredients were varied and well made, much to the
delight of European visitors expecting poor and primitive fare. One Indian trader remarked “It is
surprising to see the great variety of dishes they make… They can diversify their courses, as
much as the English, or perhaps the French cooks: and in either of the ways they dress their food,
it is grateful to a wholesome stomach.” 87 They made great use of corn, of which they had three
different varieties for different purposes. From it they baked bread, made hominy, and even
soups and beverages. They baked their bread in both large loaves and in thin cakes, and dipped it
in oil for eating. They flavored and preserved food with salt, which they processed from moss
83
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 281.
84
Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, 22.
85
Ibid.
86
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 134-136.
87
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 409.
120
gathered from creek beds. Oil was their chief condiment, and they used both hickory nut and
chestnut oil, which they obtained by boiling the nuts and skimming the oil off the top of the pot,
as well as bear oil. 88 They also ate Bear’s meat with relish, and many colonial visitors to
Cherokee country were said to begin their stay very squeamish of the offering, but ended up with
The Cherokee manner of eating was casual, utilitarian, and hospitable. In most instances
there was no real set mealtime, but rather cooks prepared food and made it available to be taken
from throughout the day as needed. They regarded food something not to be withheld, and it was
unheard of for a hungry Cherokee, or visitor to Cherokee country, to be refused board if it was
available. Customarily such provision was an everyday part of life in a Cherokee household: “on
rude side-boards, in their camps or cabins, prepared food was always kept, and any persons
coming in, were at liberty to help themselves, food was always offered to visitors or strangers
stopping, and a refusal to partake of it was considered an insult.” 90 In many towns an invitation
was not even considered necessary for one to take and enjoy the food from a house’s stores. 91
For drink, the Cherokees were quite ingenious in making a number of sweet beverages
from honey locust, hickory, and grape clusters, which were esteemed as extremely delicious by
natives and colonials alike. Cherokees did not know of alcohol before contact with Europeans,
but by the early nineteenth century they had adopted the making of beer, fermenting it from
persimmons. 92 Alcohol itself was one of the more negative food way imports from European
culture. The inhibition loosening properties of liquor had a very strong effect on Indian behavior,
particularly as they did not have a developed concept of drinking moderately. Intoxicating
88
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 136-137, 181.
89
Adair, The History of the American Indians, 415.
90
Wahnenauhi, "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," 192.
91
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 433.
92
Ibid., 138; Wahnenauhi, "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," 192.
121
substances in traditional Cherokee culture were used religiously for enlightening purposes, often
connected with communing with animistic spirits or becoming ritually pure. As a consequence,
alcohol, when available, was often consumed without restraint, and the resulting violent
tendencies were often blamed on the liquor itself rather than on the drunken imbiber. In 1756
Little Carpenter, usually a calm and astute Cherokee statesman, became drunk on rum and
threatened Captain Raymond Demere with a broken bottle. Afterwards he apologized, but in a
way which deflected blame, claiming that “there were three persons engaged in the difficulty,
and not two only; that I [Demere] was the first, himself [Little Carpenter] the second, and Rum
the third.” 93
Though disruptive, alcohol was not the chief cause of cultural friction from food ways
between the Cherokees and colonists. Instead, tensions arose from misunderstandings and
above, the Cherokees derived a large majority of their nutrition from the wilderness itself, both
through abundant game and abundant forageable produce. Early European visitors were amazed
at the richness of the North American wilderness, its forests were vast and relatively clear of
underbrush, and full of nuts and berries, yielding large herds of deer as well as edible plants.
They saw this as a lucky break for the natives who had the good fortune of living in such a
fruitful country. Their failure was in thinking this to be virgin forest, uncultivated and naturally
suited to hunt and harvest. In truth, the Indians purposefully cultivated the wilderness to make it
so ideal to meet human needs by their method of limited riverside agriculture and extensive
93
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: 1754-1765, 146-149.
94
W. M. Denevan, "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492," Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992), 371-372, 375.
122
Because this large degree of Cherokee cultivation remained invisible and unrecognized
by the colonial population, many saw instead a band of primitives lazily and unproductively
living off of particularly fortuitous land. To their own thought, active and rigorous stewardship
of real estate was a requirement for continued possession, and in their eyes that meant European
style fields of neatly ploughed furrows and fenced in livestock. Since these qualities were absent
in Cherokee country, there was a mounting sentiment that the Indians were unworthy to own it,
and that the land was thus “up for grabs.” This feeling was possibly best demonstrated in Judge
David Campbell’s statement, “No people are entitled to more land than they can cultivate. People
will not sit still and starve for land when a neighboring Nation has more than it needs.” 95 Under
the auspices of such justifications settlers increasingly encroached on Cherokee territory over the
course of time, and eventually the government embraced a policy of full blown Indian removal.
The Cherokees were not immune to prejudicial thought either, though perhaps in this case
its result was somewhat less dramatic. The animistic and sympathetic character of Cherokee
thought extended to their food ways, and as a result certain foods were preferred or avoided at
certain times because of the qualities they were thought to possess. Sinews, for example, were
avoided because to eat them was believed to cause cramps and trouble running. 96 Similarly a
pregnant woman would avoid eating speckled trout for fear that her child would be marred with
birthmarks, and a young man training for ball play would not eat rabbit because it was easily
frightened and confused and might corrupt him in the same way during the match. 97 Because of
their appearance, the Cherokees regarded the European domesticated livestock of the colonists
such as cattle and hogs as slovenly and disgusting, and they consequently felt that the colonists
95
John Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their
Removal to the West, 1838 (Kingsport: Southern Publishers, 1938), 197.
96
Payne and Butrick, The Payne-Butrick Papers Volume 2, 52.
97
Hudson, The Southeastern Indians ,321, 411.
123
themselves were brought to such a contemptible level by their keeping and continually
consuming them. 98 During the time of Dragging Canoe’s Chickamauga offensive against white
settlers, Cherokee raiders delighted in killing the penned cattle, using bows and arrows for the
purpose because they disdained of wasting powder and bullets on them. 99 Food way
inconsistencies between the two cultures caused mutual dislike, of the “lazy, unproductive
Indian” on one hand, and of the “slovenly hog-like and cow-like white man” on the other. These
sorts of attitudes made for constant erosion in goodwill, and eventually paved the way for crisis
There are two sides to the way these more visible aspects of culture interacted between
the Cherokees and the colonists. On the one hand, acculturation was far more possible in this
realm, as opposed to the deeper structures of social life and fundamental beliefs. Cherokees
readily adopted, for example, European trade goods and even building practices. Over time,
Europeans and Indians learned to communicate more clearly and became somewhat less alien to
each other. On the other hand, the immediacy of the differences that visible culture made
apparent created the contact point where tensions and animosity began. These facets of the two
cultures were at once their most flexible, and were also where the most jarring of conflicts
manifested. The irritations which rippled out from the collision of cultural ways on this level
resulted in bloody raids on settlements, wars of revenge, and greedy land-grabs. This was the
arena in which the two peoples clashed and their mutual peace shattered.
98
Gary Goodwin, Cherokees in Transition : A Study of Changing Culture and Environment Prior to 1775
(Chicago: University of Chicago, Dept. of Geography, 1977), 135.
99
Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their
Removal to the West, 1838, 212-213.
124
Conclusion
Cultural values, even within a community, are not always consistent, and thus do not
always dictate consistent behavior. Cherokees believed in promoting harmony among men, and
yet many individual warriors robbed and murdered from colonial settlements. Euro-American
Christians preached strongly against avarice and dishonesty, yet this did not stop rogue traders
from using false weights and measures to cheat Indians out of their hard earned deerskins. What
cultural ideologies did do was to color how these people felt about each other, and as cultural
discontinuity cumulatively created hostile sentiments such disruptive incidents occurred with
increased frequency. In 1733 corrupt traders caused friction by abusing the Cherokee in their
own towns. 1 In 1734 those tensions came to a head when Cherokee warriors responded by
seizing the property of a South Carolina trader for his actions. 2 In 1746 a trader was instead
murdered, reflecting the escalation of incidents. A major crisis was averted when some
Cherokees killed and mutilated the murderer in order to appease the angry Carolinians. 3 Over the
next decade colonial settlers on the Carolina border further upped the ante by encroaching on
Cherokee lands, refusing to vacate when the natives complained to their government. This, in
turn, invited more violence such as the murder of several settlers in Rowan county, North
Carolina in 1759. 4 These are only a few of the attested altercations which culminated in the
major diplomatic breaking point of the Anglo-Cherokee war. As these conflicts became a history
of continued disputes, this pattern only repeated itself with even more bitter iterations as the two
1
"To Printer of the Gazette, Sir," South Carolina Gazette, April 21, 1733 .
2
Fred Gearing, "Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century,"
American Anthropological Association 64, no. 5 (1962) 86.
3
Neither the town nor the name of the victim are recorded, but an otherwise detailed account of the
incident survives. See John Logan, A History of the Upper Country of South Carolina : From the Earliest Periods to
the Close of the War of Independence (Charleston: S.G. Courtenay & Co., 1859), 457.
4
"Charles-Town, Sept. 22," South Carolina Gazette, September 22, 1759 .
125
alien cultures clashed in the Revolutionary War, and then with Dragging Canoe’s extended
Chickamauga offensive against white settlements. By the early nineteenth century Cherokee
military might was vastly overpowered, and it was not long after the United states crushed the
Cherokee ability to resist that it expelled them from their ancestral lands altogether in the Trail of
Tears.
These were the results of the deterioration of Anglo-Cherokee relations, and in many
ways they were a function of demographics. The superior military technology used by Europeans
did play a role in the outcome of colonial conflicts with the Indians, but population levels were a
far more vital factor. The introduction of European diseases to America, and the fluke that those
diseases proved to be devastating to the Indian population without a reciprocal effect on colonial
lives, meant that once large masses of settlers began emigrating from the Old World denizens of
the New were quickly outnumbered. Thorough study of similar colonial ventures in Africa,
where new diseases did not reduce the indigenous population, demonstrate that more
sophisticated technology was not nearly enough to establish colonial dominance in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 5 This was not a problem the Cherokee were blind to.
Judd’s Friend, a prominent Cherokee warrior and diplomat who visited London after the Anglo-
Cherokee War, stated in 1763 that “our women are breeding children night and day to increase
our people.” 6 Already outnumbered, and with epidemics still running rampant, it proved
impossible to stem the tide of colonial advance. Perhaps a concerted effort at united resistance on
the part of North American Indians might have been of some use, but by the time any such
5
For a full treatment of this subject see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 98-125.
6
Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths : Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 163.
126
undertaking materialized it was too little too late. 7 Euro-Americans pushed the Cherokee and
other Indians out of their territory and assumed sovereignty over the continent.
In drawing conclusions it is important to separate such results from the cause of the
conflict itself. It is easy, looking back with a sympathetic eye from plush armchairs in the
twenty-first century, to cast all the blame at the feet of the “greedy and ruthless” white man. To
do so pollutes the analysis by allowing the tragedy of the final result to overwhelm objectivity.
Effect does not determine cause. A more perspicuous vantage reveals that cultural differences
caused both sides to develop mutual animosity, and the resulting friction created breaks in the
peace. The effect of these cultural differences might have been mitigated by more tolerant
attitudes on either side, but that cannot be known because both colonists and Cherokees were
strongly ethnocentric and lacked the cultural flexibility for such toleration to prevail. This is a
charge often leveled against the colonies, but rarely applied to native tribes because the eventual
results of the conflict victimized them to the extent that they act as analytical blinders. That the
Cherokee were ethnocentric should, however, not come as a surprise: they were after all the tribe
who called themselves ani yun wiya, “the real people.” The myriad of cultural factors discussed
in the preceding three chapters demonstrate that misunderstandings and disagreements between
the two foreign peoples caused friction and ill will which prompted aggression on the part of
Certainly some folk ways were more contentious than others, and the key facet as to
which were more so has to do with flexibility. The three tiered approach to cultural ways,
7
Pan-Indianism, often correlated with Tecumseh and his efforts at Prophetstown, actually saw its greatest
successes in the 1780s and 1790s when Shawnee, Chickamauga, Creek, and other native forces came together.
American military successes against the Chickamauga Cherokees in 1794 brought this endeavor to an end. For a
detailed treatment of the subject, see Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance : The North American Indian Struggle
for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 111-112.
127
identifying basic beliefs, structural culture, and visible culture ways reveals that the least flexible
culture ways most responsible for causing tensions are those at the foundational level. Structural
culture is slightly more malleable and ready to accommodate new ideas, and surface level culture
ways are the most susceptible to adaptation and acculturation. Cherokees and colonials alike
readily accepted all sorts of material culture, such as firearms, textiles, moccasins, and tobacco.
Social structures adapted to foreign influence over time, but factors such as wealth and gender
ways were slow to change and created a great deal of friction in the meantime. Deeper levels of
culture were far less penetrable, such as customs relating to religious beliefs and freedom ways.
Three different cases of conflict and acculturation can illustrate this. In the case of
townships, both Cherokee and colonial deeper cultural foundations rested on similar beliefs
about living in harmony with one’s fellows, responsibility to the community because of common
ancestry, and the veneration of elders because of their accumulated wisdom. These basic beliefs
created the space for family and town structures which emphasized community. In these broad
categories the two cultures shared much common ground. On the surface level, however,
technological and cultural variations resulted in far different styles of physical buildings and
layouts between English and Cherokee towns. Cherokees lacked refined building materials such
as lumbered wood and dressed stone, and had the peculiar habit of building separate houses for
summer and winter. These differences were minor, and thus caused very little cultural friction. 8
Acculturation was easily accomplished, and once the Cherokee acquired and mastered the use of
advanced metal tools, they quickly adopted building styles very similar to colonial building
ways. Where cultural discontinuity occurred mainly on the plane of visible culture, little friction
occurred.
8
At the most, Euro-Americans could perceive primitive native building ways as signs of their own
superiority over the Indians, and thus magnify an arrogant bearing which could be abrasive.
128
Both Cherokees and colonists believed in fundamental differences between men and
women. They drew strong distinctions between the two, and held to strong taboos regarding
behavior and gender roles firmly based in their religious traditions. On a structural level,
however, the two cultures differed in what exactly the proper roles for the sexes were, and also in
what the suitable accompanying taboos ought to be. Conflicting family (matrilineal versus
patrilineal) and labor (women versus men as primary agricultural workers) folk ways are a
testament to this. These differences caused significant conflict on the surface level, where
colonists severely disapproved of Cherokee men and their lazy lifestyle of hunting while forcing
their women to work the fields, and also equally despised the autonomy they observed in
Cherokee women as a result of the seven clans’ matrilocal living patterns. Even in the early
nineteenth century when the United States government’s program of “civilizing” the Cherokee
The most divisive of cultural clashes occurred in areas where all three tiers were in
conflict. Cherokee and Anglo-American disagreement about the nature of the world around them
made for a foundational cultural divergence with far reaching consequences. The animism of the
Cherokee religion caused them to see the land itself as possessing a multitude of spirits with
which, for good or ill, the tribe had to contend. They could be appeased or avoided, but never
discounted. This combined with their conception of wealth to arrive at a communal structure of
land use. The land properly belonged to the spirits which inhabited it, so while it may be used by
one person or another at certain times, it was always on a temporary basis and never true
ownership. This, of course, clashed directly with colonial beliefs based on a long tradition of
feudal hierarchy, the right of kings, and religious belief in sovereign stewardship handed down
9
Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998), 189-190.
129
by God. On the level of visible culture, this resulted in land sales perceived as permanent rights
of ownership by colonists, but only as temporary permission to use the ground by Indians. It also
led to colonial opinions that the Cherokees were not acting as proper stewards of the land, and
therefore could be justly removed in favor of proper owners (i.e., themselves). In this case, all
three tiers of culture were in disagreement, and the resulting clash of values eventually tore
There are a number of other factors which contributed to this mix of culture and
diplomacy, either mitigating or exacerbating the effects of the cultural discontinuities. One of
these is the existence of substantially influential third parties, such as the French and the other
surrounding Indian tribes. The English and French were engaged in a struggle for colonial
dominance in North America, and the allegiance of powerful native communities was a key facet
in the competition. The English considered their alliance with the Cherokee (who commanded
around 3,000 gunmen) to be the cornerstone in their strategic defense of the southern colonies.
Governor James Glen of South Carolina noted these impressive numbers, calling them “a
bulwark at our backs, for such numbers will always secure us on that quarter, from the attempts
of the French.” 10 For this reason, colonial authorities were often reluctant to act aggressively
against the Cherokee when cultural tensions stressed relations, preferring instead to put balance
of power ahead of social sentiments. Similar considerations occurred on the Cherokee side of the
equation as they relied on English trade for arms to keep up their wars with the Creeks, Iroquois,
and other native enemies. On occasions where violent incidents caused minor diplomatic breaks,
10
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: May 21, 1750 - August 7, 1754, ed. William McDowell
(Columbia: South Carolina Archives Department, 1958), 52.
130
such as in 1751 when a series of thefts and killings resulted in South Carolina embargoing trade,
both parties worked to repair diplomatic relations as quickly and expediently as possible. 11
The French were, as suggested by Glen’s concerns, not just a common enemy but also a
competitor for Cherokee alliance. French diplomacy was more attuned to Indian folk ways and
cultural sensibilities, which gave them an edge in amassing native allies. They were more
generous with gifts and less overt in showing a snide, superior attitude in their dealings. For this
reason, the English had to rely on their ability to supply better trade goods in larger quantity in
order to keep the Cherokee aligned with them. Henry Timberlake noted just this in his memoirs,
commenting that they were off put by English arrogance and, “much more inclined to the
French… but trade primarily make the English a better choice for alignment.” 12
Yet another factor which impacted cultural interchange over the course of the eighteenth
century was the wider perception of race as a relevant differentiator. The Seven Years War in
particular was a time when colonial sentiment turned against Indians as a whole. French Indian
allies attacked English border settlements, and widespread reports of Indian massacres during the
conflict triggered hysteria and anti-Indian propaganda. Though most colonists did not actually
experience Indian war personally, the terror of the savage threat spread like wildfire. The ensuing
consolidation of fear and animosity with already chaffing cultural differences led to increasing
racism against native tribes among the English colonies. The fact that racism against Africans
was already becoming normalized in plantation colonies only made adding Indians to the list of
feared and despised races that much easier. This affected the Cherokees in particular due to their
close proximity to the southern plantation colonies of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Both
11
Ibid., 189-196.
12
Henry Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake (Cherokee: Museum of the Cherokee Indian
Press, 2007), 37.
131
brands of racism appear to have been purposefully utilized to unify the diverse white emigrants
Racism was not solely a Euro-American sin however. Among the Cherokee and other
Indian tribes there was growing sentiment that the white man constituted a corrupt race which
should be driven back to the continent of their origin. Native “revitalization movements”
preached that acceptance of colonial cultural ways and trade goods had removed Indians from
their former “pure” ways and brought disaster on their heads. Much akin to how Cherokees
blamed losses in war or in ball play on ritual impurity, they blamed their decreasing population
levels and the increase of colonial encroachment on their hunting grounds on cultural impurity.
The popularity of this line of thinking led longtime enemies such as the Cherokees and Creeks to
unify in solidarity against the whites, greatly contributing to the Pan-Indian movement of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Curiously, this created a nationalistic sentiment among
the Indians which had never before existed, and was more similar to European structures than
they would have liked to admit. Brand new religious ideas were invented to accommodate the
movement such as polygenesis, the idea that Indians and whites were created separately and
ought to live separately. Cultural conflicts thus eventually created strong racist animosity on both
sides, which then served to further increase cultural tensions even more. The temporary
solidarity Pan-Indiansim created in the Cherokee community eventually gave way as their ability
to resist colonial encroachment deteriorated, and the people fractured into nationalist and
accommodationist factions which only weakened them in the run-up to the Trail of Tears. 14
13
For a detailed analysis of increasing anti-Indian racism during the Seven Years War see Peter Silver, Our
Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008).
For how slavery and anti-African racism increased see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975).
14
For a detailed analysis of Pan-Indianism and anti-white racist sentiment see Dowd, A Spirited Resistance
: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815.
132
The diplomatic relationship between the Cherokee and English colonists (and later the
United States) was complex and affected by many variables. Chief among them were the cultural
differences between the two peoples and how those differences interacted. Because the two
groups were from long separated and isolated continents, their cultural ways were almost entirely
alien to one another, with only the shared nature of the human condition to give them any
common ground. Initially they had much to offer each other, with trade and military alliance
becoming the foundation of their relationship. As the two communities grew closer together,
however, and their incompatible folk ways collided more and more frequently, good relations
deteriorated into bad. Plenty of individuals on either side were willing to bridge the gap, but were
too few to resist the destructive inertia of the ongoing cultural collision. On the whole, both
live in close proximity with toleration. Huge demographic imbalance gave colonists the
advantage and allowed them to encroach on Cherokee territory with increasing success. The
Cherokee responded in two natural ways, with armed resistance and with acculturation. Both
recourses were unable to surmount the rising tide of animosity. Armed resistance failed when
American frontier armies crushed its power base in Chickamauga. Acculturation failed because
by the time it began to bring Cherokee folk ways into harmony with Anglo-American ones, anti-
Indian animosity was already too deeply rooted in colonial culture to overcome before the United
States took decisive steps. Those steps culminated in 1838 with the removal of the Cherokee
Indians from their ancestral lands and over the Mississippi River.
Extreme cultural diversity in close proximity proved to be a recipe for tragedy. Perhaps
the greater tragedy is that this need not have been the case. Neither Cherokee nor colonial
cultures were inherently contentious, and both in fact held to traditions for peace and harmony
133
among men. The Cherokee chief Drowning Bear , after hearing passages translated from his
Euro-American neighbor’s Bible, remarked, “It seems a good book; it is strange that the white
man, who has had it for so long, is no better than he is.” 15 Much the same might be said of
Cherokee raiders who massacred English traders for deerskins despite the ancient teachings of
their priests. In the history of the Cherokee and the colonies, baser aspects of both cultures won
out over their virtues. One might wish that the population at large had followed the lead of the
Cherokee beloved man of Tellico who espoused that it was “good to be at peace with all
kings,” 16 as well as the Christian teaching, “as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all
men.” 17
15
Quoted in John Brown, Old Frontiers; the Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date
of Their Removal to the West, 1838 (Kingsport: Southern Publishers, 1938), 495.
16
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: 1754-1765, ed. William Mcdowell (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1970), 214.
17
Romans 12:18 (King James Version).
134
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