Origin of the Cherokee

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Lost Nation of the Erie Part 1
Thursday, January 21, 2016 - by Chuck Hamilton
Part 1, The Story of the Erie
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Very few nations, tribes, bands, or peoples of American Indians have been as legended and mythologized, and caught the fancy of both their fellow Native American First Nations and anthropologists throughout the Western world, as have the confederacy of tribes most commonly known, at least in the USA, as the Erie.  The best graphic evidence we have comes from the Jesuit missionaries of New France in the seventeenth century, and even that is but second and third hand.  Only one firsthand account, of an English trader out of Jamestown in 1632 who met some of their representatives among the Massawomeck, exists.  Much of the information we have is cartographical or archaeological.

The most mention the Erie usually get is that a war started between them and the Five Nations Iroquois in 1653 during the Beaver Wars, and by 1656 it was all over and done with and the Erie were no more.  The problem is that those “facts” contain only a smidgen of truth.  Yes, the Erie were conquered and subjugated in the seventeenth century, except for those who left the region, but it was not in 1656 that all of those remaining in the north were conquered or had surrendered; in fact, the war itself lasted until 1664 and the last Erie did not surrender until 1682.  But even then that was not the last of them.

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The name of the Erie
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The Erieronon, to use the Huron suffix, or Eriehaga, to use the Iroquois suffix, are called by a large variety of names in the Jesuit Relations of 1610-1791 and in related documents of New France from the period, including maps.  Variations include Enrielhonan, Rhiierrhonnon, and Enrie, as well as Rigueronnon, Riquehronnon, Erieckrenois, and Eriegoneckkak, the latter group also versions of the name of the leading tribe of the confederacy which the Virginian trader among the Massawomeck, Edward Fleet, mangled into Hereckeenes.

The French usually called them ‘Nation du Chat’ or ‘Nation des Chats’, a translation into French of the meaning of their name in Huron and other languages, ‘people of the long-tails’, about which there is a debate over whether this refers to raccoons or cougars, with solid evidence on both sides.
More properly, the Huron referred to them as the Yenresh, which would be Yenreshronon with the suffix, meaning ‘long-tailed’ or ‘long-tailed people’.  The Tuscarora name for them was Kenyrak.  The Onondaga name for the raccoon, ‘tsho-eragak’, may be related.  The Seneca, physically their closest neighbors among the Five Nations, called them the Gwageoneh.  The Mohawk called them the Arrigahaga, ‘people of Arrigha’, their chief town.  As a whole, the Five (later Six) Nations Iroquois also referred to them as the “Otkons”, or “bad spirits”.

Another name, possibly Onondaga, was Onnontioga.  The name occurs only in the Jesuit Relations discussing the peoples of the town among the Seneca made entirely of assimilated persons named Gandougaraé, where the Black Robes had their Mission of Sainte-Michel.  The other two peoples inhabiting the town were the Huron and the Chonnonton (Neutrals), and since it is known positively from elsewhere in the Relations and other sources that Erie made up a large portion of the population, the Onnontioga can be none other than they.

The Dutch referred to them as the Black Minqua, their approximation of the Algonquian term, ‘Minqua’ deriving from ‘Mengwe’, the name by which they and most Algonquian-speakers called the Iroquoian-speakers, meaning literally “without penis”.  No one can say Indians don’t have a sense of humor.  The Lenape called them Alligewi or Talligewi.  Their nearer Algonquian neighbors the Ottawa called them the Olighin.

Other names or versions of names for the Erie are Erigas, Erighek, Achawi, Kauneastekaroneah, Squakihaw, Tchoueregak, and Kahgwageono.  Sometime during the eighteenth century, their Seneca name, Gwageoneh, had metamorphosed into Kahkwa, and it is under that name that much of the legending and mythologizing took place.  The Tuscarora artist David Cusik is the source for the name Squakihaw, while Mohawk historian John Norton is the first literary source for the name Kahkwa.
The Seneca stories about their war with the Kahkwas which filled up much of their popular tales in the nineteenth century gave the impression to some scholars that here was a tribe previously unheard of whose nature was just waiting to be discovered.  This mistake continues even today, as a couple of recent publications have made a distinction between the Kahkwa and the Erie, in spite of the fact that the first person to write of the “Kahkwa”, John Norton, said quite explicitly that the Kahkwa were the same as the Erie.  Henry Schoolcraft picked up on this, but many others who have written on the Erie or the Kahwah have missed it completely.

“Kahkwa”, or the earlier version “Gwageoneh”, is the only way Seneca-language speakers can approximate the more common name as used by the French, since the language lacks the letter “R”.  Interestingly, Norton also called them the “Rad-irakeai-ka”, and wrote that they lived in the town of “Kaghkwague”.
The Erie probably shared the same autonym as the Huron and the Petun:  Wendat.  The Black Robes (the Huron nickname for the Jesuits) wrote that the language of the Erie was nearly identical to Huron, and the Huron did not call them “Attawandaron”, meaning, colloquially speaking, “those people who talk funny”, as they did the Chonnonton (aka “Neutral Nation”) to their west and the Massawomeck to their southeast beyond the Erie.  ‘Attawandaron’ signifies an Iroquoian language but a separate dialect, while ‘Akwanake’ signifies a speaker of an entirely different language altogether.  For instance, the Huron called all Algonquian-speakers Akwanake, and the Cherokee as well, though the reason for that are another story.

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Names on the landscape

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The example which stands out most is the second of the Great Lakes from the east, Lake Erie, which the French called both Lac du Chat and Lac de Chonty, both references to the Erie.  For English speakers, and some French speakers, the more common early name was Lake Okswego, apparently the Huron name.  One more that appears on some late seventeenth century French maps is Lac Teiocharontiong, another native name; Jolliet called it Lac Teiocharontiong des Erie, making clear which was meant.
Less obvious are the Allegheny River, the Allegheny Mountains, and the Allegheny Plateua, all deriving from Alligewi or Talligewi, the Lenape name for the Erie and/or the Cherokee.  My contention for several years has been that the two are one in the same.
In the early decades of the eighteenth century, there was likewise a town of Allegheny across the Ohio River and slightly upstream from Shannopin’s Town of the Lenape.  It stood at the site of the later American town of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which existed from 1788 until 1907, when it was annexed by the growing city of Pittsburgh.

What is now called the Allegheny River was considered the upper part of the great Ohio River In earlier centuries.  In fact, when the Lenape called the Ohio the Alligewi-sipu or Talligewi-hanna, they meant the whole length from the headwaters of the Allegheny.  Same for the Ottawa, who called it Olighin-sipu, a name which makes the transition from the Algonquian-language names for the Erie, Alligewi and Olighin, to Allegheny, even easier to see.  Ohio, by the way, was the Seneca name for the whole river.  An early name for the river among the colonists of the British provinces referencing the Erie was Black Mingo River.
At one time, the Lenape referred to the entire region which the Erie occupied as “Alligewinek”, or ‘place of the Alligewi.
To this day, the Seneca name for Eighteen Mile Creek that enters Lake Erie at Hamburg, the location of the Kleis Site, is “Koghquaga”, a reference to the Kahkwa.

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Their territory
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Though many sources claim that their territory spread from Niagara River around the southern shores of Lake Erie to Sandusky Bay in the west and to the southeast to the Ohio River.  One historian even claimed the Erie occupied the Ohio River from Beaver Creek to the Wabash River, which would be the western border of Indiana.  Some have even claimed the Erie were the people who built the Fort Ancient Culture in southern Ohio.

The archaeological record does not support either of those contentions.  Archaeologically, the Erie sites are identified as the Ripley Focus of the Iroquois Aspect of the Northeastern Phase of the Woodland Pattern.  The sites belonging to the Ripley Focus stretch from East Aurora, NY southwest to Erie, PA, and some believe that sites within Buffalo, NY may be included as well.  While realizing that the confederacy’s territory would not have been confined to their towns and farming plots, it would still be but a fraction of the larger claims.  The probable true boundaries of the territory of the Erie were the lake on the north, the Genesee River on the east, the Allegheny River on the south, and the Grand and Mahong Rivers on the west.
Five major terminal sites have been discovered at distances of between twenty and twenty-five miles from each other, indicating a separate polity or tribe but sharing enough characteristics to signify belonging to a larger body as well.  Each of these protohistorical sites contains European trade goods, is palisaded, and quite large.  Within proximity to each are three to five earlier sites suggesting that within each group a single body of people migrated from one to the other.  The terminal sites show no sign of several dependent villages as had been the case with earlier stages, mirroring the tribes of the Five Nations in centralizing population for defense.

From east to west, the five known terminal sites, as identified by anthropologists Marian White and William Enghlebert, are the Bead Hill Site in East Aurora, NY; the Kleis Site in Hamburg, NY; the Silverheels-Highbanks Site near Irvine on the Cattaraugus Creek Reservation; the Ripley Site in Ripley, NY; and the East 28th Street Site in Erie, PA.

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There may very well be other, even larger sites as well that have not been discovered; only recently, within the past decade or so, town sites in Huron territory have been found large enough to support the French figures of a Huron population of thirty thousand at the beginning of the colonial era.  The same holds true for satellite village sites connected to the central fortified towns at the five terminal sites; the Franquelin map of 1684 shows “19 v. detruits” for the Ganientonga, one of the tribes of the Erie confederacy, meaning sixteen to eighteen dependent villages in addition to the one to three large palisaded towns.
Some nineteenth century accounts claim for the Erie “twelve towns and twenty-eight villages”, but here they are confused with the Chonnonton, the autonym for the confederacy and proto-chiefdom commonly known to Americans as the Neutral Nation.

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Constituent subtribes
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Of these there were four, maybe five: (1) Arrigahaga; (2) Kentaientonga; (3) Oniasontke; (4) Atrakwaeronon; (5) Takoulguehronnon.

When encountered by the French and until the destruction of their seat in 1654, the leading tribe were the Arrigahaga (Erigaronon), centered on the town of Rigue, or Arrigha, and maybe limited to it.  Several of the names from contemporary accounts and maps use names to refer to the entire Erie people which more specifically refer to the people of this town: Riquehronnon, Rakouagega, Kakouagoga, Rigueronnon, Erieckrenois, Erigas, and Eriegoneckkak.

The Arrighahaga are the “Kahkwa” proper; Kahkwa, or Gwageoneh, derives from the Seneca language, which has no letter “R”, nor a letter “L” for that matter, and therefore cannot say “Arrigha” or “Rigue”.  The earliest cartographical evidence of this name lies written on the 1680 Bernou map, which shows “Kakouagoga” as a “nation detruite” approximately where Hamburg or Buffalo lie now.  The next appearance is on the 1688 Franquelin map, located in what appears to be a more southerly spot at the southeast corner of the lake in the form “Rakouagega”; later maps use Bernou’s form.

The second tribe were the Kentaientonga, or in other forms, Gentaguega, Gentaguetehronnon, Gentaientonga, and Kentayentonga.  The one time the name of their central town or village is mentioned, it is given as “Gentaienton”.  The only time they appear on a map, Franquelin in 1688, they are located on the Allegheny River, though this may not be accurate, and they are listed as formerly having had nineteen villages, which probably is accurate.

The third tribe were the Oniasontke, also written Honniasont and Honniasontkeronon, meaning, ‘people of the place of crook-necked squashes’.  They first appear on the Franquelin map of 1688 on the Allegheny or Ohio River downstream from the Kentaientonga, with the notation, “2 vill destruits”, but they are mentioned in Abbe Galinee’s journal in 1669.  Their name appears on maps into the early eighteenth century.

The fourth tribe were the Atrakwaeronon, under which name they appear in the Jesuit Relation for 1652, which gives the name of their main town as “Atrakwae”.  On the anonymous map of “Nouvelle France” dated 1641 (probably created by Bourdon), the tribe appears as the “Akhrakvaetonon”, which according to anthropologist John Steckley, last remaining speaker of the Huron language, means ‘people of the east’.  They appear elsewhere under the name versions Akhrakuaeronon and Ohreokouaehronon.

A possible fifth tribe may have been the Takoulguehronnon, whose sole appearance is in a list of nations conquered by the Five Nations Iroquois in the Jesuit Relation of 1656, preceding the “Gentaguetehronnon”, one of the forms of Kentaientonga.  The 1862 work, A Description of the Province and City of New York, gives the name of their town as “Takoulgue”.  Anthropolgists Steckley and James Pendergast believe that the Takoulguehronnon were the same as the Atrakwaeronon, so it is clear they both believe the group to be an Erie subtribe, but the two names bear little if any resemblance.

Culture of the Erie confederacy
The Erie shared a many features of a common culture with the western Iroquois tribes and confederations: Huron, Petun, Chonnonton, Wenro, and possibly Chondake and Massawomeck.  The statements of the Black Robes that the Erie spoke an identical language to that spoken by the Huron and Petun plus the fact that the Huron did not call them Attawandaron as they did the Chonnonton and the Massawomeck tells us their language was essentially Huron.

We know from various contemporary annals and journals that the Erie were led by a female chief, though probably not one holding the fanciful titles given her by the Iroquois.  The same was likely true for each of the constituent tribes.  The office would have been on the “white” or peace side of the leadership structure; as far as well can tell, the leaders in the field of war were all men.  Each town and perhaps dependent village would have been self-governing, with decisions made by the larger group by consensus.

As for their religion, they probably gave homage to a number of spirits of varying degrees of significance, and believed in an overall force that gave life to all living things.  This the western Iroquois shared with their eastern neighbors.  Among the Huron and Petun, and probably among the Erie also, this force was called Orenda or Iarenda; among the Mohawk and Cayuga it was called Orenna or Karenna; among the Oneida it was Olenna or Kalenna; among the Onondaga and the Seneca, it was called Oenna or Gaenna.

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The Orenda compares to the Nu of the Kapampangan people of the Philippines, the Mana of the Polynesians and Melanesians, the Wakonda of Siouan-speakers, the Manitou of Algonquian-speakers (though these also use the word manitou in other ways), and the Kami of Japanese aboriginals known as the Ainu.  The Huron have other words for ‘spirit’, ‘ghost’, ‘god’, and ‘soul’; the Orenda is a separate concept from any of those.
They were unique among North American Indians for using poison-tipped arrows to great effectiveness during war, and perhaps hunting.
Like most other Native Americans, they tortured select prisoners for several hours or even days before burning them to death, adopting the rest or using them as slaves for a time, which was usually followed by adoption.  Like their fellow Iroquioans, they also probably partook in ritual cannibalism, especially of honored enemies.  Given the status in which they clearly held women, the Erie followed the practice of the Huron of avoiding the torture and burning of women which the Chonnonton and Five Nations Iroquois engaged in.

While previous each of their constituent tribes had lived in scattered villages with a large fortified town as their center of society, by the early seventeenth century, certainly by the fourth decade, most of the tribes had converged within themselves into a single larger densely palisaded town, with perhaps small hamlets outside the walls.  This was almost certainly true for the easternmost subdivisions of the confederacy.  The earlier pattern, however, may have held at least for the Kentaientonga, if Franquelin’s comment is correct.
In the decades before the Beaver Wars began in earnest, the Erie were allied militarily with the Chonnonton confederacy and with the Wenro, and also with the Mississauga.  Upon the entrance of the Europeans onto the scene, they forged trade relationship with the English of Virginia through the Massawomeck and with the Dutch and the Swedes of New Netherlands and New Sweden through the Andaste (Susquehannock).  Their military alliance with the Chonnonton collapsed in 1648, and in 1653 they forged a military alliance with the Andaste.

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The Erie-Iroquois War

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The war between the Erie and the Iroquois did not start in 1653, when the Erie attacked the Seneca, but in 1651, when the western Iroquois attacked the Atrakwaeronon and finished the job the next year.  The desruction of Atrakwae may have been intended as an object lesson to a powerful neighbor.  Why the Erie attacked in 1653 may have been as simple as realizing they were the next conquest after the fall of the Huron, the Petun, and the Chonnonton.

That the Erie were a large people adept at war is proven by the fact that the Onondaga, the central tribe geographically and politically, representing all the Five Nations, sought an audience with the French asking their assistance in the war against the Erie, which was apparently not going very well in 1654.  Besides their poison-tipped arrows, which the Erie archers could fire at a rate of eight to ten compared to time it took for a single shot of the Iroquois with the Dutch supplied arquebuses.  The Erie had these too, but not as much access to shot and powder as their antagonists from the east.

The Erie-Iroquois War did not end in 1656, despite the commentary of some of the Jesuits in letters and in Relations (a “relation” was an annual report to the head of the Jesuit Society’s missions in New France back in Paris).  Eight hundred Honniasont warriors and their families took up residence with the Andaste in 1662 to aid them in their war with the western Iroquois and their allies.  The Jesuit Relation of 1664 describes the report from the Iroquois of the final defeat of the Erie that year.  But it is not until 1682 that the Iroquois report was is supposedly the last group of Erie finally surrendering, a group numbering some six hundred persons.

Some of the Erie were adopted and assimilated (except for those who were tortured, burned, and eaten), but the majority of those who surrendered lived in communities with other surrenderees like those in the town of Gandougarae in Seneca territory.

The final group of surrenderees described just previously may have formed the community that lived at Mingo Flats in the current Mingo, West Virginia.  That population town became the core of Crow’s Town on the Ohio River (now Mingo Bottom, Steubenville, OH) during the French and Indian War.  The town spread across the river to Follansbee, WV, occupying both sides until the Treaty of Fort Stanwix restricted them to the right bank of the river.  Its population, known to Americans as Mingo along with other Iroquoian-speakers (including a sizable number of Erie desecendants) who had earlier moved into what is now western Pennsylvania, migrated to the Ohio Country in 1774.

After their central town, Arrigha, was destroyed and much of the population killed or made captive, the Rigueronon, still with 600-700 warriors, transferred to the outskirts of Virginia, where the local tribes called them the Richahechrians.  In 1656, they fought a battle against colonial rangers and a party of Pamunkey, and won.  By 1670, the “Rickohockans” were in the mountains to the west of the colony of North Carolina.

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Fate of the Erie
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Joined by other northern refugees, picking up others along the way, and assimilating the remnants of the Mississippian survivors in the areas they settled, the Richahechrian-Rickohockan were initially identified on maps as three separate groups: the Tchalaka, the Kituwagi, and the Taligui. After a few decades, they were known as the Cheraqui/Cherekay/Cherokee.
Several sources report the origins of the Cherokee in the north.  Some of those and others report the Cherokee establishing towns in the Upper Allegheny-Ohio Valley, in the late eighteenth century, trying to gain, or regain, a foothold in the north.  According to Bishop Johannes Ettwein of the Moravian Brethren, the war between the Lenape and the Cherokee over this territory began in 1698, and that by 1710-1715 they had driven them out with the help of the Iroquois; Mooney gives the date as 1708.
This incursion can easily be understood as a desire to return to their home territory, or at least near it, on the part of the Cherokee, who were formerly Erie and Huron and Chonnonton (and Shawnee and Powhatan, according to the Moravian Brethren).  It also explains the willingness of the core Iroquois, the “old stock”, to release its firm grasp on its dependents and allow the Lenape, Shawnee, and Mingo (descendants of Erie, Huron, and Chonnonton living among them) to settle what is now western Pennsylvania.
Descendants of the Erie survive today among the Six Nations, the Seven Nations of Canada, the Seneca-Cayuga Nation in Oklahoma, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, and in the three tribes of the Cherokee (Eastern Band, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and Keetoowah Band).  The Seneca-Cayuga descend from the Seneca of Sandusky who were actually Mingo, later joined by two separate groups of Cayuga.  The Eastern Shawnee descend from the Mixed Band of Seneca and Shawnee formerly on the Scioto River, the “Seneca” portion actually being Mingo.

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Chuck Hamilton
natty4bumpo@gmail.com
Origin of the Cherokee - Part 2 of 5
Cherokee Country at Spanish contact
Monday, September 15, 2014 - by Chuck Hamilton
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There were no Cherokee in “Cherokee Country” at Spanish contact, of course, since there were no Cherokee anywhere at the time because they did not exist as a people.  The area in which they later lived, the Appalachian Summit and the contiguous areas in the Carolina Piedmont and the Ridge and Valley region of East Tennessee, was inhabited mostly by Muskogean-speaking and some Eastern Siouan-speaking people who were demonstrably not Cherokee.

Like all Mississippians, the dominant political structure of the Muskogeans was the chiefdom, governed by an “orata” from the mound center, with satellite hamlets and individual homesteads.  In many cases, these chiefdoms, in turn, paid homage to a paramount chiefdom, whose ruler was a mico.  This was the typical structure of the Late Mississippian period.  De Soto, De Luna, and Pardo encountered ten chiefdoms ruled by micos in our target area: Guale, Mocama, Orista, Escamacu, Cofitachequi, Guatari, Joara, Chiaha, Coosa, and Tascaluza.

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Hernando de Soto ventured through the Carolinas, East Tennessee, North Georgia, and Northeast Alabama in 1540.  Tristan de Luna’s party visited North Georgia then Southeast Tennessee (specifically the Chattanooga area) from their colony on the Alabama River in 1560.  Juan Pardo’s troops traveled through the Carolinas and East Tennessee in 1567 and1568 from the then capital of La Florida at Santa Elena on Parris Island, South Carolina.
The following is a brief sketch of the lay of the land as the Spanish encountered it in their entradas of the sixteenth century.  Information from the chroniclers of the various entradas plus brief sketches of archaeology, demonstrates that there was simply no room for the Cherokee in Cherokee Country in the sixteenth century.  The Spanish chroniclers mention numerous towns, or tribes, whom their leaders encountered.  More inland, in areas the Spanish brushed without entering, lay towns whose record is mostly archaeological.

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One of the terms I’ll be using is “phase”, as in “Dallas Phase”.  An archaeological “phase” is the physical cultural complex within a defined region between two given points during a certain time period.  It does not necessarily correspond to ethnic group or language.
The central feature of these, like all Mississippian phases, were seats of central power with large platform mounds, of which thirty-three existed in the Dallas Phase region and fifty in the Middle Cumberland Basin.  Not all were simultaneous, of course, many of those close together were sequentially and some sites were inhabited, abandoned, and reinhabited, Coastal Plain at Spanish contact

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Leaving Santa Elena, the Coastal Plain north of the Savannah River was dominated by two paramount chiefdoms: Orista (Edisto) and Escamacu.  The towns subject to them included Ahoya, Witcheough, Wimbe, Toupa, Mayon, Stalame, Combahee, Kussah, and Ashepo.  All of these are collectively referred to as the Cusabo, and they may have spoken forms of the Arawak languages of the Caribbean.
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Across the Savannah, the Coastal Plain between the Savannah and the Timucua peoples in northern Florida fell under the paramount chiefdoms of Guale and Mocama, north and south of the Altamaha River respectively.
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Carolina Piedmont at Spanish contact
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Moving inland, you would first encounter Cofitachequi in the vicinity of modern Camden, South Carolina.  Pardo knew the town as Canos; its people later became the Cusseta, or Kasihta, of the Creek Confederacy.  At the time of De Soto’s expedition in 1540, Cofitachequi’s authority spread across most of South Carolina and a large part of North Carolina, held by a woman.  In archaeological parlance, Cofitachequi and its people and environs make up the Mulberry Phase.  Being that the Cofitachequians became the Cussetas, it’s safe to assume that most if not all within the Mulberry Phase spoke Eastern Muskogean languages.
Thirty miles due west of the western outskirts of Cofitachequi’s territory across the uninhabited stretch of the Savannah River Valley from its mid-course to its mouth lay the people whom De Soto encountered along the Oconee River known as Ocute before his entrada into Cofitachequi in 1540.  Ocute and its environs made up what archaeologists call the Dyar Phase.  Its descendants and successors were the Hitchiti, who spoke a Southern Muskogean language.
To the immediate north of Cofitachequi in the Piedmont region of North Carolina was the “province” of Chalaque, or Xalaque.  In the Mobilian trade language which was the lingua franca of the Southeast, “Chalaque” signified speakers of a different language.  De Soto’s recorders do not mention the name of the town here, but Pardo’s chroniclers called it Otari, while maps as late as the early eighteenth century refer to it by the first appellation.
We can glean the identity of these “speakers of a foreign language” from the name of their dominant town, Xualla, which Pardo’s records call Joara.  Except for the “l” versus the “r”, the pronunciation is identical; one would surmise that De Soto’s informants were Muskogean-speaking while Pardo’s were Siouan-speaking.  The people at this town were the same later known to the English as the Siouan-speaking Sara or Cheraw.  Most Siouan-speaking groups in the area later coalesced as the Catawba.  In De Soto’s time, “Xualla” was subject to Cofitachequi but in Pardo’s time “Joara” was independent and a paramount chiefdom.  Joara was the center of what to archaeologists is the Burke Phase.

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By Pardo’s later time, the eastern region north of Cofitachequi also formed a separate paramount chiefdom under the town of Guatari, whose mico in his time was a woman.  This name is even more clearly that of a Siouan-speaking people, those later known to the English as the Wateree, which held on to the most of its Mississippian culture as late as 1670.  Guatari dominated what archaeologists have named the Caraway Phase.
Remember that although so far every archaeological phase I have named has coincided with a mico’s territory that the two are not equivalent.  One is a cultural region, the other is a political entity, and sometimes the boundaries of the two overlap, as we shall see.
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The lesser towns of the Carolina Piedmont, north and south, included Guiomae, Ylasi, Sanapa, Unuguaqua, Vora, Ysaa, Catapa (Catawba), Vehidi, Otari, Uraca, Achini, Ayo, Canosca, Tagaya Major, Tagaya Minor, Suhere, Suya, Uniaca, Ohebere, Aracuchi, Chiquini (a subject town of Guatari whose orata was a woman), Quinahaqui, Uchiri, Guaqiri, Tocae, Uastique, Enuque, Enxuete, Xeneca, Atuqui, Sarati, Ohebere, Guaqiri, Autqui, Osuguen, Aubesan, Pundahaque, Guanbuca, Ustehuque, Ansuhet, Guararuquet, Enxuete, Jueca, Qunaha, Vastu, and Dudca.
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Having gone further north before turning west, De Soto and Pardo both missed the Tugalo Phase at the uppermost reaches of the Savannah River, which in the sixteenth century included the Chauga, Tugalo, and Estatoe sites.
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Further directly west of the Tugalo Phase, on the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River sat the Nacoochee Phase, its two main sites being Nacoochee and Eastwood.  Beyond there to the west was deserted until the outskirts of the paramount chiefdom of Coosa.
Appalachian Summit at Spanish contact
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On the opposite side of Xualla/Joara to the west sat the town of Cauchi, the most important in its immediate area though still in the orbit of its eastern neighbor.  Different historians have tried to equate it with either of two towns down the line, but neither really stands.  Cauchi was at the time the most important town in what to archaeologists is the Middle Qualla Phase.  This was in the eastern Appalachian Summit area of western North Carolina.
What is most interesting is the names of several towns whose oratas came to meet with Pardo here, later used by the Cherokee after their arrival and coalescence: Neguase (Nequasse), Estate (Estatoe), Tacoru (Tugaloo), Utaca (Watauga), and Quetua (Kituwa).  None of these can be translated into any of the three dialects of Cherokee, not unusual for Cherokee towns, such as Chickamauga, Chatanuga, Tellico, Chatuga, Echota, Tanase, Chilhowee, Citico, Tuskegee, and Hiwassee.  The opposite case, towns having names deriving from Cherokee, was the exception rather than the rule.
In the mountains of northwestern North Carolina, past the concentric spheres of influence of Cauchi and Joara, lived the Chisca, as named by De Soto’s guides, whom Pardo’s chroniclers called the Uchee.  Obviously, these are those who still call themselves Yuchi.  Their territory spread into Upper East Tennessee and Southwestern Virginia, and was roughly coextensive with the Late Pisgah Phase.  As for their language, the Yuchi are a linguistic isolate.
The towns of the Chisca/Uchee Pardo visited were Guasili and Canasoga in Upper East Tennessee (probably on the upper Nolichucky River).  Two others were Guapere on the Watauga River, probably the same site as the later Watauga Old Fields, and Maniateque near Saltville, Virginia, both of which were destroyed by Spanish soldiers under Hernando Moyano in 1567.  The latter has been demonstrated fairly conclusively by archaeology and by examination of historical record by Jim Glanville.
Ridge and Valley at Spanish first contact
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Geographically, the first two locations in this section belong to the Appalachian Summit, but politically in the sixteenth century formed part of a Ridge and Valley based polity.
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A fifth  town of the Yuchi people was the only one subject to outside control: Tanasqui, at the confluence of the French Broad and Pigeon Rivers.  Tanasqui at the time seemed to be subject to the chiefdom on its immediate south.

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At Zimmerman’s Island near the modern Dandridge, Tennessee, on the French Broad lay the major town of Chiaha, then the dominant chiefdom in East Tennessee.  The town was also called Olamico, and now lies beneath Douglas Lake.  The people were later called the Chehaw.  The people of Chiaha spoke a Southern Muskogean language mutually intelligible with Hitchiti and Oconee.

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Most archaeologists and historians consider Chiaha’s subject town of Tanasqui the northernmost limits of the paramount chiefdom of Coosa.  I completely disagree with that idea, however, given that the chief of Chiaha was a mico in his own right according to all the annalists.

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Both De Soto and Pardo stayed at Chiaha.  De Soto’s chroniclers mention no other towns in the vicinity, but Pardo met oratas from Cansoga, Utahaque, Anduque, Enjuete, Guannguaca, Tucahe, Guaruruquete, and Anxuete there.  Five leagues due west of there, he met the oratas of Otape, Jasire, and Fumica at his camp in the open.
At Chiaha, we begin the Dallas Phase, to which archaeologists have assigned almost all of East and Southeastern Tennessee, at least up to now.  Here the Spanish saw their first palisaded towns due to hostilities with Chisca.  Other archaeological townsites besides Zimmerman’s Island on the French Broad known to exist in the sixteenth century were Henderson 1, Fain Island, and Brakebill at its confluence with the Holston River.  McMahan and Henderson 2 in the Forks-of-the-Pigeon district in the vicinity.  Halfway between Brakebill and Coste on Bussell’s Island is another on Post Oak Island.

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South of Chiaha in the Holston Valley, De Soto found the town of Coste (Coushatta) on Bussell’s Island at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River, later home to the Overhill Towns of the Cherokee.  Its people spoke a Western Muskogean language closely related to Alabama, Choctaw, and Chickasaw.

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From Coste, De Soto traveled upriver and encamped his expedition on the riverbank across from the town of Tali on McKee Island which formed part of the Toqua site just south of where the Great Indian Warpath between Mobile and Newfoundland forded the Little Tennessee.

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Nearly thirty years later, Pardo came down the Little Tennessee from Chiaha through a rough pass through the mountains through Chalahume (Chilhowee) headed toward Coste, stopping for the night at Satapo (Citico).  Another sixteenth century town site lay upriver from Chalahume at Talasee, through or past which Pardo had to traverse but never mentioned.  Pardo turned went back to Chiaha via a much less arduous route to avoid an ambush.
De Soto, on the other hand, turned south at Tali headed toward Coosa along the Warriors Path, which bisected the Great Indian Warpath at Vonore, Tennessee, going north to the Ohio River and southwest to the Coosa Valley.

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The next town De Soto and his troops encountered after their turn south was Tasqui, which from the accounts can only have been the Late Mississippian site at Great Tellico near modern Tellico Plains.  Here the the Trading Path (aka Unicoi Turnpike) branched off toward the mountains in the east and the piedmont beyond.
From Tasqui, the next stop was Tasquiqui, whose people become known to the English and French as the Tuskegee.  The Tuskegee spoke a Western Muskogean language, so it is not unlikely that the other villages along the whole route from Coste to there did also.  The town of Tasquiqui can only have been at the later Great Hiwassee, now the site of Savannah Farm near Delano, Tennessee.

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Tasquiqui was the last town of the Dallas Phase on the road De Soto’s road to Coosa.  De Soto’s chroniclers did not name it nor Tasqui, rather when Pardo stayed in Satapo contemplating the later aborted journey to Coosa, his informants named them.

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Leaving Tasquiqui, De Soto arrived in Coosa two days later after staying the night at an unnamed village or town which was probably in the vicinity of Ellijay. Coosa was the most powerful town of its day, dominating the entire Coosawattee Valley, the upper Coosa Valley, and parts of Southeast Tennessee.  Though it was at its northeast extremity, Coosa was the center of the culture archaeologists call the Barnett Phase, lying at what they call the Little Egypt site at Coosawattee, now under Carters Lake in northern Murray County, Georgia.

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The rest of the towns of the Barnett Phase from northeast to southwest the large abandoned townsite of Talimuchasi at the Etowah Indian Mounds; Itaba (Itawa), at the Leak site; Ulibahali (Hotliwahali), at the Coosa Country Club site in Rome, Georgia; Apica (Abihka), at the King site; Onachiqui; Tuasi (Tawasa); and, finally, Talisi (Tallassee), near modern Childersburg, Alabama, on the border with the paramount chiefdom of Tazcaluza.

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The towns in Coosa’s realm spoke dialects of Eastern Muskogean languages.  The last two towns tenuously under Coosa (Tuasi and Talisi) belonged to what archaeologists call the Kymulga Phase, while that of Tazcalusa covered roughly the same area as the Moundville III Phase.

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Returning back to Coste at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River, had De Soto headed west and travelled down the Tennessee River instead of turning south, he would have encountered once sizable towns on Huffin Island, then at De Armond below it, perhaps also at Thief’s Neck peninsula below there.
Beyond that collection of towns lay the group of settlements in the Hiwassee Valley and its vicinity known as the Mouse Creek Phase, which were abandoned shortly before or shortly after De Soto’s entrada.  Ledford Island in the Hiwassee River was the largest, and there were also towns on North Mouse Creek, South Mouse Creek, the Rymer site on the south bank at Charleston Landing, the Ocoee site on Ocoee River just above its confluence with the Hiwassee, the Sale Creek site on the Tennessee, and the Upper Hampton site just north of Euchee Old Fields at Rhea Springs.

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The Great Indian Warpath forded the Hiwassee at Charleston, Tennessee, near the Rymer site, intersecting the Black Fox Trail, between Black Fox Springs (Murfreesboro) and the southwest tip of North Carolina, at the Calhoun, Tennessee.

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The next group of towns in the Tennessee Valley we learn about from both archaeology and from the chronicles of De Luna’s 1560 expedition north from the newly-established colony of Santa Cruz on the Alabama River to the town of Coosa in Northwest Georgia.  While he was there to secure food and supplies and more firmly establish the Coosa-Spain alliance, the mico of Coosa requested he and his men take part in an expedition to put down a revolt by one of his subject peoples.
From descriptions of the terrain of these people, the Napochi, and the route to get to them there is little doubt of their geographic area: Southeast Tennessee.  In this part of the sixteenth century, there were five towns Dallas Phase towns in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area.  From southeast to northwest, these were at the “Little Owl Village” at Audobon Acres; the David Davis site at Vulcan Recreation; the Citico site at the mouth of Citico Creek (not to be mistaken for the other Citico site on Little Tennessee River); the Hampton Place site on Moccasin Point; and the Talimico site on Williams Island.

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The joint Coosa-New Spain force attacked the town at Audobon Acres, only to find it deserted, so they burned it to the ground.  They then followed the trail of the refugees to the Citico site on the Tennessee River.  Here had been an important town during most of the Hiwassee Phase and in the Early Dallas Phase before being abandoned around 1300.  In its heyday, it was the most important town in East Tennessee.  After being deserted for a century and a half, people returned, building a much smaller mound opposite the older, much bigger mound.

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The two groups of refugees fled across the river, probably at Ross Shoals just above the head of Maclellan Island.  After some back and forth, the “rebels” agreed to pay tribute in food and goods three times a year.  Then the invaders returned to Coosa in triumph.  From Pardo’s informants we learn that the name of this town that was burned was Olitifar, a corruption of the Muskogee name Opelika.

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Several miles downstream from the Napochi towns, at the head of yet another Long Island, this one straddling the Tennessee-Alabama stateline, was the southwesternmost Dallas Phase town, one of the multi-mound variety.

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The Great Indian Warpath crossed the river at the foot of the island, then passed along the left bank until merging with the Cisca and St. Augustine Trail (between Nashville and Augusta and St. Augustine) until passing over the foot of Lookout Mountain in the east.  A branch of the Cisca and St. Augustine known as the Nickajack Trail split off at the mouth of Murphy’s Hollow, passing up it to Lookout Valley then over Lookout Mountain, rejoining its parent among the ridges of North Georgia.
Below Long Island, the Crow Creek Phase stretched down to the river’s westward bend at Guntersville, Alabama, with major townsites at Sauty at the mouth of North Sauty Creek, Crow Creek Island, and the Cox site four miles north of the latter and the most important of the three.

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North and west of this lay the Vacant Quarter, comprised of the Middle Cumberland region, uninhabited since 1400, and the American Bottom, uninhabited since a century before that.

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Central Mississippi Valley at Spanish contact

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Though my main purpose with the foregoing discussion has been to demonstrate how full of other peoples the later Cherokee Country was in the sixteenth century, I need to include encounters from the other end of Tennessee because some of them will enter the picture in subsequent discussion.
After travelling through northern and central Alabama, a journey which included the Battle of Mauvilla, De Soto encountered the Chicaza and the Alibamu in eastern central Mississippi before traveling northwest to come out at the Mississippi River at the Chucalissa site, known to De Soto’s chroniclers as Quizquiz and to archaeologists as the Walls Phase, which straddled the big river.

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On the far side of the big river, the Spaniards encountered Pacaha, or the Parkin Phase, and Casqui, or the Nodena Phase, who at the time were waging intensive war against each other.  The latter enter our target region later.  The next major “province” down the Mississippi was Quigualtam, to archaeologists the Wasp Lake Phase, the chiefdom of which was based at the Winterville site.  Ethnologists and archaeologist surmise that these three peoples spoke dialects of Tunican languages.
South of there was an unnamed chiefdom, undoubtedly the precursor to the contact period Natchez then based at the Emerald Mound site, center of the Emerald Phase.  The Natchez, of course, spoke the Natchez language.

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Chuck Hamilton <natty4bumpo@gmail
Origin of the Cherokee - Part 3 of 5
Saturday, September 20, 2014 - by Chuck Hamilton
Survival and dissolution of Mississippian societies

The politics and demography of the Carolina Piedmont remained remarkably stable from their configuration to the advent of English colonization.  Expeditions by Francisco Fernandez de Ecija in 1605 and 1609 and by Pedro de Torres in 1627 and 1628 reported Cofitachequi, Joara, and Guatari as the dominant towns in the region.
The Virginian explorer James Lederer echoed those assessments in 1670, with Wateree being the most powerful and most Mississippian politically.

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With the advent of slave-raiding by the Occaneechi for the colony of Virginia and by the Westo on the Savannah River, these Mississippian remnants collapsed.
The Cheraw and the Wateree migrated south to refuge with other Siouan-speakers such as the merged with other Siouan language speakers such as the Yssa (Esaw), Catapa (Catawba), Gueca (Waxhaw), Uchiri (Ushery), and Suhere (Sugaree) to become the Catawba nation of the eighteenth century.  The Cusseta of Cofitachequi vacated the entire region for the lower Chattahoochee River to become one of the two leading Lower Towns of the Creek Confederacy.

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The demographic landscape of the later Cherokee Country itself changed even more drastically after the Spanish abandoned Santa Elena and Carolina in 1587, withdrawing south of the Savannah and shifting their capital to San Agustin.  Some of these changes may have occurred as much as a decade prior to that benchmark.
The Yuchi moved out of Holstonia, the Appalachian Summit area of Upper East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and northwestern North Carolina, from the end of the fifteenth century through the early sixteenth century.  Collating information from various maps, mostly made based on information of French voyageur traders from Canada, we find the Yuchi dispersed by bands across a broad landscape under many different monikers: Yuchi, Hogohegee, Tahogale, Tongoria, Chichimeca, Chisca, Ogeechee, and Westo.

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We can be certain the Yuchi diaspora included towns on the upper and probably middle Tennessee River, the Savannah River, the Chattahoochee River, and the Coosa River, and even on the Ohio River.  One band of Yuchi migrated all the way to La Florida and the dominion of New Spain, where they were known by the name Chisca.  Spanish authorities employed them to negotiate with the Yuchi-speaking Westo on the Savannah River.  The Westo established their town of Hickauhaugau on the Savannah River in 1656.

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During the same time as the Yuchi began to disperse, the Chiaha moved to the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River, where they were still located in 1720.  The larger portion of them later moved downriver to join the Lower Towns of the Creek Confederacy, from which their greater portion moved into Florida to become one of the two main sources of the Seminole, along with the Oconee.

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The Coushatta moved down the Tennessee River, at one point occupying a settlement in what is now Marion County, Tennessee, probably at the head of Long Island.  The Tali did the same, and that will be covered soon.

The fate of the Satapo and the Chalahume remains a mystery; they may merged with the Coushatta, or with another town/tribe, or may have stayed on location along the Little Tennessee.

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The Tamathli, a Southern Muskogean-speaking people, established a town on that river near the end of the sixteenth century and remained to become one of the Overhill Towns of the Cherokee, spelled Tomotley.  The lower Little Tennessee Valley was otherwise deserted after the first or second decade of the seventeenth century.  Swanton report another town at Tomotla on the Valley River, Cherokee County, North Carolina.
The people of the Mouse Creek Phase vacated the Hiwassee region within a decade of De Soto’s entrada.  Who they were, and where they went, is a mystery.  The layout of their towns was similar to those of the Napochi towns in the Chattanooga area, but their burials differed in being fully extended rather than flexed.  They share a feature with eighteenth century Cherokee towns in that domestic buildings were connected summer and winter abodes.
Of the Napochi, we know that the towns at the Audobon Acres site and the Dallas occupation at the Citico site were abandoned after the De Luna entrada, with their residents probably relocating to the Hampton Place site.  Where the peoples of Hampton Place, David Davis, and Williams Island later went, no one knows, or has even hazarded a guess as far as I know.
The people of the Crow Creek Phase and the Dallas Phase town on Long Island and dependent hamlets probably joined the towns formerly of the upper Coosa Valley, as they were abandoned at about the same time.
 By the end of the sixteenth century, all the towns of the Coosa paramount chiefdom removed southwestward.  They had already abandoned the upper Coosa Valley for the Weiss Basin by about 1575.  Before 1630, the town of Coosa stood on the present site of Gadsden, Alabama, with the towns of Abihka, Hotliwahali, Itawa, etc., in the vicinity.  Later, they moved even farther south into what is now Talladega County, where they became the foundation of the Upper Towns of the Creek Confederacy.

Tennessee River, seventeenth thru early eighteenth centuries

Cartographers bestowed a variety of names on the Tennessee River in the colonial period, the three most often seen on maps being Caskinampo, Hogohegee (one of the names for the Yuchi), and Cherokee, sometimes with different names for the upper and lower stretches.

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From the second half of the seventeenth century, around 1660, explorers and traders from New France began to penetrate the interior more frequently and more deeply than before.  At first these voyageurs came from Canada, but later they came from both Upper and Lower Louisiana.  French cartographers converted their verbal accounts into maps.  These are very valuable for getting a picture of what the make-up of the interior was like in terms of population location, though they are hardly of modern GPS precision.

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Most relevant for the area in question are a number of towns always pictures close together, most on or adjacent to islands in the river.  Different maps give different names, and different versions of names, and by sifting through all of them we can make a good guess as to which tribes they were and where these were during this period, seven in all.

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Bookending this collection of tribes are a “small town” of the Chickasaw and a town of the Shawnee.  The first town lower on the river can only be the settlement at what was later known as Chickasaw Old Fields in the vicinity of Guntersville, Alabama.  In between these two are the Yuchi (under various names), Kaskinampo (De Soto’s Casqui relocated eastward), Coushatta, Tali, and Tuskegee.  Other than the two bookends, there is little agreement on the relative position of the towns.
Several maps, especially later ones of this period, show two towns on the same island, the Coushatta at its head and usually the Kaskinampo at its foot, though at least one map names the Yuchi.  They also usually show a “French fort”, more likely a trading post, in the center of the island equidistant from the two towns.  One cartographer shows Coushatta and Kaskinampo, then a few years later in an update shows two towns of Coushatta, indicating that the former absorbed the latter.  This was most likely Long Island in Marion County, Tennessee and Jackson County, Alabama.  The towns and the outpost remained until after the French and Indian War, when the two towns of Coushatta merged into a single entity, with one portion moving to Larkin’s Landing just below Scottsboro, Alabama, while another went south to join their long lost Alabama cousins in the Middle Towns of the Creek Confederacy.

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Because of the elimination of other possibilities, the Tali probably settled Burns Island in the Tennessee River Gorge, in the section known as the Narrows.
The Tuskegee probably occupied Williams Island given that the militant Cherokee who refused to make peace in 1776 named it that when they lived in the area.  These Tuskegee were the group who later moved southwest to the Creek Confederacy.  There was also a town on the Little Tennessee River founded by a portion of the Tuskegee, who became part of the Cherokee.

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From Cherokee accounts, maps of an even later period, and local names, we know that the Yuchi, at least some of them, settled the mouth of the Hiwassee River, and perhaps the island there, as well as at least one other locale nearby, Euchee Old Fields in Rhea County, which is probably the Chestowee reported by Charles Hicks.
As the upriver bookend, the Shawnee town would have been upriver of that, perhaps in the Chattanooga area or maybe further upriver or east of that.  The ford at the former Great Hiwassee carries the curious name of “Savannah Ford” from the earliest days of white settlement, probably carried over from the Cherokee occupation when Savannah was a synonym for Shawnee.

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From 1684 to at least 1705, French maps shows three distinct towns or tribes living on the headwaters of the Tennessee River.  With varying versions of the names, these were the Tchalaka, the Katugi, and the Taligui.  All three belong to the later Cherokee as a whole and correspond to their linguistic (and perhaps ethnic) division into Western, Middle, and Eastern.  These were the later Cherokee in a middle stage of coalescence of Iroquoian-speaking refugees from the north, sometimes amalgamating with remnants of decimated local tribes and bands.  And that is the rest of the story.

The last surviving Mississippian chiefdom

We cannot do justice to the survival of Mississippian culture without mentioning the Natchez of the appropriately-named Natchez Phase.  The Natchez Phase directly succeeded the Emerald Phase of the Plaquemine Culture.  When the French encountered the Natchez in 1682, their elite had recently moved from the Emerald Mounds site to the Fatherland Mounds site also known as the Grand Village.

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In addition to practicing the Southern Ceremonial Complex in its classic form, the Natchez were ruled by Suns, as their chiefs were called, and their first chief was called the Great Sun, who had supreme authority of civil and religious affairs.  His chief assistant, the Tatooed Serpent, wielded authority of matters of diplomacy and war.  In terms of class, there were two overall categories with a few divisions each, but these were fluid.  Women of the Sun class were required to marry from the common class, for instance.

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While cultures in the Cherokee Country zone in the Late Mississippian period had long ago abandoned temples atop mounds for community council houses atop mounds, the Natchez kept their temples and residences of the elite on top of their mounds.  When one of the great officials died, man of his family would sacrifice themselves in order to be buried with him, and mothers would even sacrifice their babies.

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The division into Sun-class and commoner class echoes the Yuchi division into the Tsoyaha (“children of the sun”) and the Titdgo, their own commoners.  While in the Holstonia region of the Appalachian Summit at first contact, the Yuchi probably originally lived in the Middle Cumberland Basin before moving east after whatever disaster left it deserted.

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The French and their Choctaw allies destroyed the Natchez in 1730 in the Third Natchez War, selling survivors into slavery in the Caribbean.  Survivors found refuge with the Chickasaw and with the Cherokee, and some probably with the Creek.

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In the North
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While Spain made its entradas into the South, France made entrees into the North.  The first three were made by Jacques Cartier.  In 1534, he “discovered” Newfoundland and the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.  It was his second trip, from 1535 to 1536, which proved the most useful, for he penetrated the interior via the St. Lawrence River and encountered several towns, or tribes, all of which were heavily fortified.  This was due to warfare with the Iroquoian-speakers to the south, the Haudenosaunee or Five Nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk) of the nascent League of the Iroquois.
Cartier named several towns in his journals.  The two most prominent were Hochelaga (at Montreal) and Stadacona (at Quebec City).  The rest he named were Araste, Hagochenda, Hochelay, Satadin, Starnatan, Tailla, Teguenondahi, and Tutonaguay.  They were not just at war with the Haudenosaunee either.  Unlike their more astute cousins to the south, they engaged in war with each other also.
In Cartier’s third voyage in 1541, he was second chair to Jean Francois Roberval in an effort to establish a colony.  The colony, led by Roberval, collapsed two years later and the survivors returned to France.  The French turned their attentions elsewhere for several decades.
In 1562, the French made their first attempt at planting colonies in the lower Forty-Eight with Charlesfort on Parris Island and Fort Caroline at the mouth of the Altamaha River in Georgia.  The first last little more than a year and the second was destroyed by the Spanish fearing piracy who also exterminated its inhabitants in 1565.
When Cartier made his entrees into Canada in the first half of the sixteenth century, there were probably around 120,000 St. Lawrence Iroquoians, or Laurentians, living in an estimated twenty-five tribes.  By the time Samuel de Champlain established a much more successful colony in 1605 (following failed ventures in 1598 and 1600, the Laurentians had vanished and the St. Lawrence Valley was a land without people.
Historians, archaeologists, and demographers have offered widely disparate theories as to the cause of the Laurentians’ disappearance and their ultimate fate.  The earliest popular hypothesis was that they had been eradicated by warfare with the Haudenosaunee, with survivors adopted into the League and others by the Huron (Wyandot).  Later, others floated the idea that they had been killed off by disease or starved due to drastic weather changes.  The truth is probably a combination of these factors.

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Beaver Wars

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The Beaver Wars as such began with an attack on the Haudenosaunee by Champlain’s troops in alliance with the Huron in 1609.  Lasting nearly a century, the fighting ravaged the Great Lakes region, the Ohio Country, the Illinois Country, and Kentucky (from the Seneca word Kintake, “land of the prairies”), ending with a treaty in 1701.
Fighting between the tribes of the north had been going on for at least a century before that, however.  For instance, the Huron had penetrated as far south as the Allegheny Mountains bordering West Virginia by the end of the sixteenth century, but the Haudenosaunee drove them out and back north.
Like the Haudenosaunee, the Huron of southern Ontario were a confederacy made up of five tribes: Attignawantan, Attigeneenongnahac, Arendarhonon, Tahontaenarut, and Ataronchronon.  The immediate cause of attack was the Huron eagerness to acquire French products, particularly firearms, but the longer cause was the warfare which had been continual since the beginning of the sixteenth century.  They and the French attacked the Haudenosaunee again in 1615.
Between 1610 and 1614, the Dutch established a series of seasonal trading posts, finally establishing Ft. Orange at the later Albany in 1618, which they replaced with Ft. Orange in 1624.  In 1628, the Haudenosaunee defeated the Mahican and gained a trade monopoly with the Dutch at Ft. Orange.  The Susquehanna had similarly defeated the Lenape who had the monopoly with New Amsterdam before going on to destroy the Honniasont as a political entity.
West of the Seneca, the westernmost of the Five Nations, lived the Iroquoian-speaking Wenroe, approximately the same size as the average of the Five Nations.  In 1638, the Haudenosaunee, having hunted out the Hudson Valley, turned on them for conquest and either absorption or eradication in order the acquire more land for the pursuit of the pelt.  Survivors fled to the Huron and to the Erie on their immediate west

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In 1648, the Haudenosaunee, led by the Mohawk, ravished the territory of the Huron, adopting hundreds of survivors and dispersing the remainder, who fled southwest seeking safety near the Odawa and the Illinois.  Many of the refugees took shelter with the Haudenosaunee’s western neighbor (since the eradication of the Wenroe), the Erie.

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The Erie, or Riqueronon, a confederacy of tribes, controlled a vast area from the east of Lake Erie to the west of it, and most of the land south of it halfway to the Ohio River.  At first contact, their main towns were around the southeastern shore of Lake Erie.  After the wars began they moved several miles to the west.  During the 1620’s they may have had settlements west of the Alleghenys near the colony of Virginia.  In 1641, they still lived on the lake, with the Wenroe to the east, the Attiwandaron (possibly a branch of the Chonnonton, possibly a different group entirely) to the south, and the Kickapoo to the west.

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The Haudenosaunee overran and dispersed the Tionontati (who also called themselves Wyandot) in 1649, some of the survivors joining the refugee Huron.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Chonnonton (Neutrals, also Attiwandaron) were the largest political entity in the entire region, a twenty-tribe confederacy, governed by the Tsouharissen, or “Child of the Sun”.  They were on the verge of becoming a full-blown chiefdom before the Beaver Wars began.  That, and the death of the current Tsouharissen without a successor led to the social and political disintegration of the Chonnonton.  When attacked in 1650, they collapsed and were driven from their territory, some joining the Erie, some being absorbed into the ranks of their conquerors.

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In 1652, the Haudenosaunee drove the Scahentoarrhonon from the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, adopting those they captured and killing or dispersing the rest.
The Erie started a war with the Seneca in 1653.  The fighting between the two began in earnest the next year, but even though they lacked the firearms which the Haudenosaunee had in abundance, 1654 was not a good year for the League.  By mid-1656, however, the latter managed to destroy the two biggest towns of theie enemies after protracted sieges, killing the inhabitants, after which the survivors dispersed.

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Some Erie survivors they adopted.  Some fled to the Huron remnant in the west, some to the Susquehannock, where they became the core of the later Mingo, who were also known as the Black Mingo and closely affiliated with the Lenape and the Shawnee.  The largest group of Erie or Riqueronon survivors struck southeast.  One would imagine they took the Attiwandaron south of them (possibly a different group from the Chonnonton) along for the trip.

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In the 1660’s, the Haudenosaunee attacked the settlements of New France directly.  The Dutch lost a war and the colony of New Netherlands in 1664, so the League found their supplies cut off, and the French conquered part of their territory in 1666.  Then England took over where the Dutch left off, and even increased their support.  Warfare against France’s allies, then again with France itself, continued until the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, by which time the Five Nations had cleared the Ohio Country and eastern Illinois Country, and made Kintake (Seneca for “prairie grounds”) their personal playground.

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Chuck Hamilton <natty4bumpo@gmail.com>
Origin of the Cherokee - Part 4 of 5
Thursday, September 25, 2014 - by Chuck Hamilton
Rechahecrian/Rickohockan

As mentioned previouly, the largest group of Riqueronon, or Erie, survivors of the attacks by the Haudenosaunee (League of the Iroquois) crossed the Allegheny Mountains into Virginia, where they established a town at the forks of the James River of about six hundred warriors.  The sudden appearance in the neighborhood of so many Trans-Allegheny invaders greatly upset the Trans-Atlantic invaders in the English colony of Jamestown.
Summoning their close allies formerly of the now dissolved Powhatan Confederacy, the English marched against the recent arrivals, known to them as the Rechahecrians, in force.  The resulting encounter, known in colonial records as the Battle of Bloody Run, proved to be a decisive defeat for them and their Pamunkey allies.

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The “Rechahechrian” may have been following the footsteps of previous Iroquian refugees from Haudenosaunee aggression.  The Iroquian-speaking Nottoway, Meherrin, and Tuscarora, perhaps descendants of the Laurentians or from recently defeated tribes or both, already had themselves well-established before Edward Bland’s exploration of “New Britain” in 1650.

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Although they had just defeated their attackers spectacularly, the Riqueronon/Rechahechrian had no real desire for any more continual conflict, and so moved on further south.  In 1670, James Lederer ran across some of them in the town on Occaneechi Island visiting from west of the mountains to seek a trade agreement with the English.  He calls them Rickohockan.  They did not survive their visit; their hosts killed them for no reason apparent to Lederer, but one would suspect the Occaneechi wanted no rivals.  The map he crafted for the publication of his journal show the Rickohockan clearly inhabiting the Cherokee Country.

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The year 1682 saw the earliest map to name the Cherokee, drawn by French cartographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, although for a few decades all did so as if there were three distinct peoples, as mentioned previously, in varying forms of Tchalaka in the west, Katugi in the middle, and Taligui in the east.  According to John R. Swanton of the Smithsonian, this map was based on information dating to at least 1670.

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The next contact after Lederer on record between the people who became the Cherokee and the Europeans is the treaty of trade in 1684 with the colony of Carolina signed by five leaders from Toxaway and three from Keowee.  Though the records do not mention the name “Cherokee”, we can be certain that by this time the people later known as Cherokee had coalesced.

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Indian slave trade

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American history books tends to ignore the fact, but the slave trade of Indians was booming business in Carolina (and later South Carolina), Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  Three times as many Indians slaves were trafficked outbound through the port at Charlestown than were African slaves during the years 1670-1730, the peak of the trade.  Ports of destination included several countries in Europe, the Caribbean, and New England.  The export trade from Jamestown and Baltimore targeted the same markets, while Boston also the same except switching Virginia and Carolina for New England.
While those so enslaved might object, it was not the Trans-Atlantic invaders who condemned them to servitude but their fellow Native Americans.  A few tribes or rather tribal confederacies secured monopolies in trade between the colonies and more inland peoples, each partnering with a different colony as these were all separate and often competing entities both politically and economically (with more stress on the latter).

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The trade monopoly business is largely what provoked the Beaver Wars.  The Haudenosaunee trafficked slaves, but the main reason they took captives was to replace dead members.  Also, control of the supply source of beaver skins played a major role as more and more places were trapped out.  In the South, the corresponding animal product trade was in deerskins, a bit of a problem since deer were also the major source of dietary meat.

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Remember that the opening scene of 1992’s “The Last of the Mohicans” where Hawkeye shoots the elk and then prays to it asking its forgiveness for killing it for food?  That was nothing but late twentieth century New Age Indian fantasy.

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As indicated above, the Haudenosaunee displaced the Mahican to achieve the monopoly with Fort Orange of New Netherlands and later all of New York.  The Susquehanna defeated the Lenape to obtain the monopoly with New Amsterdam and Baltimore.  The Occaneechi were a confederacy that came into existence largely for the purpose of trade monopoly with Virginia.  For Carolina, the Westo monopolized the position of middle-man.

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Before their destruction as a power by the Haudenosaunee, the Huron served the same function with French Canada.  After the foundation of La Louisiane, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw competed with each other until the Third Natchez War in 1730, at which the Chickasaw began to trade with the English at Charlestown instead.  They even established a colony of their own on the Savannah River where they were known as the Lower Chickasaw that lasted until 1775.

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The Spanish in La Florida had no slave trade of their own.  Instead they subjected the tribes in their domain to the encomienda and repartimiento systems, the latter replacing the former by the end of the sixteenth century.  In the former, local leaders were responsible for providing assessed tribute and labor.  In the latter, tribute labor was usually managed through the missions.

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The favorite targets of slave raiders were the settlement Indians of rival colonies and the mission Indians of Spanish La Florida.  Settlement Indians came in seeking shelter from the local slavers only to find themselves easy prey for the slavers of a rival colonies partners.  For instance, the Occaneechi raided settlement Indians in Carolina but kept their hands off the settlement Indians of Virgnia.  The situation reversed in the case of the Westo.

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Although the Occaneechi did skirt the later Cherokee Country, the party most responsible to the collapse of remnant Mississippian society in the Carolina Piedmont was the Westo, especially with the jump in demand beginning in 1670.  In addition to the mission Indians of the La Florida provinces of Guale and Mocama and the settlement Indians of Virginia, the Westo harvested captives from the Cusseta, the Coweta, Chickasaw visiting for trade with Carolina, the Cherokee newcomers to the region, and even the Chisca, their fellow Yuchi living in La Florida.

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After just a few years, neighbors, European and Native American, looked at these “middlemen” with increasing trepidation.  The Haudenosaunee even appealed to their erstwhile enemies in French Canada for support against the Susquehanna in 1672.  Three years later, 1675, they finally delivered a serious defeat, and the colony of Maryland gave them refuge.

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Merely a year later, the Susquehanna found themselves embroiled in another war, this time with the colony of Maryland, a conflict instigated by the Doeg (a sub-tribe of the Nanticoke).  The conflict helped spark Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, and the two conflicts became intertwined for a period.  After Bacon and his men had killed sufficient number of their native enemies to quench their bloodlust, they turned on their Occaneechi allies.

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At the end of the rebellion, the Occaneechi who were left merged with the Tutelo and the Saponi.  The Susquehanna fled north, taking refuge with their erstwhile foes, the Haudenosaunee.

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Around this same time, Carolina took aim at the Spanish settlements on the coastal plain south of the Savannah River.  These were dominated by mission networks among the formerly larger chiefdoms of Guale north of the Altamaha River and Mocama south of it.  Proceeding mainly through the proxies of the Westo and some of the Lower Creek, between 1675 and 1680, they had sent hundreds into Caribbean slavery and sent the rest fleeing.  Some reached the vicinity of San Agustin, others went west and merged with other remnants to become the Yamasee.

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Fear of their growing power on the part of Carolina and resentment over the slave-raiding and trade monopoly on the part of all their neighbors led both parties to attack the Westo beginning in 1680.  The main native antagonists were the Hathewakela Shawnee on the Savannah River, who rendered unto the Westo as they had rendered unto so many others.  By 1682, the Westo were so reduced that they left for the Chattahoochee.  The Shawnee stepped into place as the main trading go-between.  Several tribes picked up the mantle of local slave catcher.

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The Erie’s old foes the Seneca may have played a part also.  Around this same time (1680), they began slave-raiding among the Southern tribes, kicking off a war with the Catawba which lasted until a formal peace treaty in 1759.

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The shattered remnant of the Westo moved to the Ocmulgee River and later merged with the Yuchi on the Chattahoochee.  The Occaneechi merged with other Siouan remnants of Virginia such as the Tutelo and the Saponi which eventually migrated north to the Six Nations.

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Two years after the expulsion of the Westo, the leaders of Keowee and Toxaway made their first journey to the capital at Charlestown to establish a trade agreement.  While not identified as Cherokee at the time, by that year, 1684, they certainly were at least proto-Cherokee.
Nine years after that, in 1693, some twenty leaders of the Lower Towns on the Savannah, Keowee, and Tugaloo Rivers travelled to Charlestown again, this time seeking direct trade, especially for guns and ammo.  They also sought members of their towns taken by the Catawba, Shawnee, and Congaree for sell in the slave trade, but these unfortunates were already in New England and in the Caribbean.

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A decade later, 1703, several members of the Carolina assembly were complaining the Cherokee were capturing too many of their settlement Indians to sell in Virginia.
Apparently the other members of the assembly decided the best way to deal with the problem was to trade trafficked humans of the native variety directly with the slavers because South Carolina's slave trade with the Cherokee did not end until 1748.

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Coalescence of the Cherokee

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In what may be the earliest known written use of the name “Cherokee” (spelled “Cherakees”), Daniel Coxe produced a map 1705 of Greater Carolina, in essence the Southeast, which replaced Tchalaka, Kitugi, and Taligui with that name for all three divisions.  An earlier map in 1701 by French cartographer Guillame de l’Isle had garbled the name as “Tarachis”.

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English colonists began to use the name “Cherokee” (in various spellings) when referring to these Iroquoian-speaking people about this time, although that name did not consistently appear on maps until around 1720.  This demonstrates that the Lower Towns were the point of contact in these early stages with the colonies for the Cherokee and with the Cherokee for the colonies.  Had it been one of the other major divisions, the name would be “Chelokee”.
William Bartram travelled throughout the Southeast in the mid 1770’s, and became the first to describe the Cherokee as being divided into five geographic divisions: the Lower Towns on the headwaters of the Chattahoochee and Savannah Rivers; the Middle Towns on the upper Little Tennessee, upper French Broad, and  Nantahala Rivers; the Out Towns on the Tuckaseegee and Oconaluftee Rivers; the Valley Towns on the Valley, Cheowa, and upper Hiwassee Rivers; and the Overhill Towns on the lower Little Tennessee, Tellico, and lower Hiwassee Rivers.  His journal documents forty-three towns; there may have been as many as fifty or sixty.
This distribution changed radically during the Cherokee-American wars of the late eighteenth century as the Cherokee removed themselves progressively more westerly.

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The Moravian missionaries living among the Cherokee over two centuries ago called the Cherokee language a mixed language with an Iroquoian structure and grammar and vocabulary from a variety of sources.  In this they saw no problem because they recognized that the Cherokee were an assimilationist people.

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The closest dialect to the northern Iroquoian, Mohawk for example, was the Eastern dialect spoken in the Lower Towns which retained the “R” sound which the other two lacked.  The Middle dialect (also called the Kituwa dialect) spoken in the Middle and Out Towns, replaced the “R” with the “L”, but mostly agreed with the Eastern dialect in grammar.  The furthest removed and most mixed dialect was the Western dialect, sharing the “L” with the Eastern dialect but deviating more in structure and vocabulary.

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The Middle dialect is still spoken by members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.  The Western dialect is still spoken by some members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians.  The Eastern dialect began a rapid decline once the former Lower Towns were lost early in the Cherokee-American wars and the people no longer lived in a separate geographic area.

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You will be assimilated

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Regarding the groups which contributed to the Cherokee melting pot, we know that the migrants from the north included Erie (Riqueronon, probably the largest group), Huron, Chonnonton, and Attiwandaron, and there were possibly others.  If the Moravians are correct, the Shawnee and Powhatan also contributed bloodlines.
There can also be little doubt that the newcomers assimilated the remnant groups inhabiting the areas they settled as well as absorbing new refugees.  In the first category, we can be sure the Tamathli on the Little Tennessee River were one, and most likely a band of Tuskegee who took refuge on the same river.  Remnants of the Satapo and Chalahume may have been there when the “Rickohockans” arrived as well.

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While the Cherokee destroyed the Yuchi town at Euchee Old Fields, there were also Yuchi living on Hiwassee Island as well as on Pinelog, Chickamauga, and Conasauga Creeks in Northwest Georgia.  There may have been other tribes west of the Appalachians and probably were.

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The Middle Towns clearly absorbed the people of the Middle Qualla Phase, represented in the name Katugi, or Kituwa (the contact era “Quetua”), the peoples whose center had formerly been at Cauchi.  They may also have assimilated Siouan-speaking refugees.

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The Iroquoians who settled the uppermost Chatthoochee and the Keowee, Tugaloo, and Chattooga Rivers most likely found those lands vacant, as they were able to preserve their language in a more pure form.

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Among the more notable of the refugees the Cherokee absorbed were a good portion of the surviving Natchez.  Many of these fled to the main body of the Chickasaw centered on Tupelo, Mississippi, but the greater number wanted to get as far from the French and the Choctaw as possible.  These found a home with among the Cherokee at Notchy Creek in the Little Tennessee Valley, at Ahquohee on the north bank of the Hiwassee River above the mouth of Peachtree Creek in Valley Towns area, and at Gulaniyi at the confluence of the Brasstown and Gumlong Creeks in the Hiwassee Basin, also in the Valley Towns area.

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The Iroquoian newcomers seem to have adopted certain aspects of Mississippian society after their arrival, though in light of the polity of the Chonnonton, they may have brought it with them.  According to some sources, the Cherokee were ruled or governed by a chief priest assisted by a secular leader for diplomatic and war matters and a college of lesser priests.  These may be the class James Mooney refers to as the Ani-Kutani.  His informants told him that the Cherokee got fed up with their abuses and killed them all.

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Not your DAR grandmother’s cuddly Cherokee

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The Cherokee of the eighteenth century were not the peaceful, cuddly, warm and fuzzy civilized version as which they have often been mythologized through emphasis on the story of Nancy Ward.  They liked war.  If you doubt that, read some of the stories James Mooney collected for his book.  They were often brutal, cruel, vicious, and indiscriminate, but that was native warfare.  In their myths and legends, the Cherokee bragged about it.  Captives were often tortured to death for amusement, though captives who showed bravery in the face of horribly painful torment and certain death became legends still revered more than a century later.

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Contemporary colonial writers frequently noted the fondness of the Cherokee for war.  Some even questioned whether they took part in any other endeavor.  It’s not too surprising, therefore, that the Wolf clan, the one for warriors, was by far the largest of their seven (originally fourteen) clans.  A quick look at their activities in the eighteenth century confirms that assessment.

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First, however, look back half a century at their Erie, or Riqueronon, predecessors.  They picked a fight with the Haudenosaunee.  The League wiped out or at least destroyed as an entity the Wenroe in 1638, the Huron in 1648, the Tionontati in 1649, the Chonnonton in 1651, and the Scahentoarrhonon in 1652.  So the Erie, ruled at the time by a woman, declared war on the Seneca, one of the Haudenosaunee’s constituent tribes, in 1653.  We already know how that turned out, else we would not be reading about the Cherokee now.

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Almost immediately on the heels of the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, Seneca warriors began coming down the Warriors’ Path from the Ohio Valley to attack the Cherokee and capture live bodies for the slave trade.  No less perturbed than the Catawba, the Cherokee responded with counter-raids in the north.

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The war with the Haudenosaunee lasted until the Treaty of Johnson Hall in 1768, meaning the war stretched across the years 1701-1768.  According to James Mooney, the year 1708 was when the last town of the Cherokee in the north was burned by the Lenape, though after the “Cherokee” had departed, not with them still inside it.  We can’t know if these people were remnant Erie, some other Iroquoians, or another tribe which ultimately sought refuge with the Cherokee in the south.  The reason for the destruction, however, was the Lenape decided its inhabitants were  too fond of war.

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The same year, 1708, the Cherokee invaded the Mobile Bay area along with the Alabama, Abihka, and Catawba with the intent of destroying the French capital of La Louisiane and Ft. Louis.  For some reason, the four thousand-strong force never made the attempt but contented themselves with destroying the nearby town of the Western Muskogean-speaking Mobile tribe.

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Two years later, the Cherokee began a war against the Chillicothe and the Kispoko bands of Shawnee on the Cumberland River, fellow refugees from the Haudenosaunee armies, largely at the instigation of their Chickasaw so-belligerents.  The Chickasaw began to feel threatened after some of the Hathewakela Shawnee began to relocate there due to the fighting in the Savannah Basin.  That was lasted 1710-1715.

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The Cherokee took an active part in the Tuscarora War of 1711-1715 as allies of North Carolina and South Carolina.  The belligerent southern band of Tuscarora who started the war and their Algonquin-speaking allies faced the militias of both colonies and warriors of the Cherokee, Apalachee, Yamasee, southern band of Tuscarora, and many  others.

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In 1715, the Cherokee joined their Yamasee allies in the First Yamasee War attacking South Carolina and the Catawba, only to switch sides the next year.  A good thing for them, because the Yamasee were heavily defeated by 1717 and evolved into the Yamacraw.

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While in the middle of that conflict, around the time they switched sides, the Cherokee killed an entire delegation of Creek leaders in transit to Charlestown and staying in Tugaloo.  The resulting Cherokee-Creek War lasted 1716-1755, ending at the Battle of Taliwa, which the Cherokee won.

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During the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the Cherokee fought alongside the English mostly on the Virginia frontier beginning in about 1755.  In fact, the war with the French prompted the English to negotiate peace between them and the Creek.

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In 1758, the Cherokee walked off the lines, so to speak, and returned home, where they launched their own war against the English, primarily of the colony of Virginia, in 1759.  The Cherokee War lasted three years, with a contingent of Creek under Great Mortar at Coosawattee, the “Old Coosa Place”, as allies.

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Part of the reason the Cherokee left the fighting in Virginia, besides their ill treatment by English officers, was that war had broken out in 1758 between them and the Chickasaw.  This was in large part fallout from the Chickasaw war against the Piqua band of Shawnee who had been invited by the Cherokee to settle where their cousins had been.  This war lasted one year past the Treaty of Johnson Hall between the Cherokee and the Haudenosaunee.

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And speaking of the Six Nations, remember that through all these other “smaller” wars, the Cherokee had been carrying on fighting with the Haudenosaunee the whole time.

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Individual Cherokee warriors took part in Lord Dunore’s War alongside Shawnee, Lenape, and Mingo warriors in 1774.
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The Cherokee-American wars lasted 1776-1794 with constant fighting, and included their part in other conflicts such as the American Revolution in which they also fought as allies of the British, the Oconee War as allies of the Creek, and the Northwest War as charter members of the Western Confederacy.  Their foes were Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the Overmountain settlements in East Tennessee, the Cumberland settlements in Middle Tennesee, and lastly the United States of America.

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Chuck Hamilton
<natty4bumpo@gmail.com>
Origin of the Cherokee - Part 5 of 5
Monday, September 29, 2014 - by Chuck Hamilton
A few closing comments

I have looked at a godawful number of seventeenth and eighteenth century maps showing locations of various tribes and towns, etc., over the past twenty years, too many to list even if I could remember them all.

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American writers often use the name Attiwandaron as the autonym for the confederacy also known as the Neutral Nation, and when writing of their defeat in the Beaver Wars almost always describe them as being destroyed.  The word Attiwandaron is a Huron word, not an autonym, and was also used for a separate group south of the Erie/Riqueronon as well as the Neutral Nation from which they were distinct.  The Neutrals were not destroyed, in fact; they still exist as a First Nation in Canada, where they are commonly called by their true autonym, Chonnonton, which is why I have used the name here.

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The French applied the name Huron to a distinct group whose autonym was Wyandot or Wendat, and they called another group Petun, also known as the Tionantati or Tobacco Nation.  Since these later also used Wyandot as their autonym, I have adopted the French designations.

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Some people have been putting out lately the mistaken idea that Xualla in De Soto and Joara in Pardo were completely different and widely separated entities.  James Lederer equated the two in his account of his journeys in discussing the actual people in the actual town he actually visited in 1670, so I take his word for it.

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When first reimagining the route of DeSoto through our target area, Hudson, et al, identified an island roughly a day’s journey down the Tennessee River from Bussell’s Island, below its confluence with Clinch River, as Tali.  Sometime later Hudson wrote an article for Tennessee Anthropologist detailing his opinion change on that particular town to the Toqua site, about a day’s journey upriver on the Little Tennessee. Tali was clearly on an island and McKee Island is the only one in the vicinity with the correct archaeology.  At the height of the town at Toqua, the island was part of the town.

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Thomas Lewis and Madelaine Kneberg equated the Mouse Creek Phase with the Yuchi largely because of the account of South Carolina traders Eleazar Wiggan and Alexander Long inciting the Cherokee of Great Hiwassee into exterminating the Yuchi of “Chestowee”.  That, however, was in the early eighteenth century after populations had shifted around quite a bit.  At the time when the Mouse Creek site were occupied, the Yuchi were in the Appalachian Summit.  Most anthropologists now recognize Mouse Creek as an in situ development out of Dallas.

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Lynne Sullivan’s paper on the Chickamauga Basin chronology provided much helpful information about the Nickajack Basin on the Napochi towns.

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The Napochi episode provides powerful evidence against the hypothesis that the authority, or at least power, of Coosa extended all the way up the Tennessee River to include Chiaha on the French Broad River.  At least not in the time of De Luna and certainly not in the time of Pardo when the ruler of Chiaha was called mico, the title for a paramount chief.  While Coosa’s power and authority may have at one time reached to the Little Tennessee and the French Broad, even to the time of De Soto, I submit that at the time of the later Spanish entradas, it did not, and that Chiaha had risen much the same way as Joara and Guatari.

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Thanks to Michaelyn Harle’s research, we now know that the town at the David Davis site, while interacting with its close neighbors in terms of marriage, did most of its trading with Coosa and little with its neighbors.  It is quite possible that the Coosa-Spanish attack may have been directed against the wrong target, or that the attack may have been to reinforce the position of the David Davis site as Coosa’s local representative.

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The Hampton Place site has produced more sixteenth century Spanish artifacts than any site north of the Rio Grande other than St. Augustine.  Amazing, considering that not only did none of the Spanish entradas stay there, they did not even visit.  The Napochi there could only have amassed the horde through trade.
Regarding my placement of a 17th century Yuchi town on the Ohio River, early 18th century French maps clearly show a town or settlement under the name Tongoria there along with a same-named town or group on and/or just below Hiwassee Island.

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Many, maybe even most, will object to my location of a Shawnee as the upper river bookend town on the Tennessee River, the argument probably that it is a mistake for the town on the Savannah.  However, the same maps that also show a town located on another river that is clearly the Savannah.  Given that Hiwassee Island is probably one of the islands inhabited at that period and that the Hiwassee could have been misconstrued as the upper part of the Tennessee, the townsite could have been at the later Cherokee townsite of Great Hiwassee which I identify here with sixteenth century Tasquiqui.  Which might explain “Savannah Ford”.

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The Lenape, or Delaware, whom the Cherokee referred to as the “Grandfathers” referred to the Cherokee by the name Talligewi, or Alligewi, and still do to this day.  In the first form, the relation to the Cherokee before they coalesced as such should be obvious.  The name of the Allegheny Mountains and the Allegheny River derives from the second rendering of the name.  Demonstrating the breadth of Erie power, the Lenape referred to the whole basin of the Ohio River (“Alligewi Sipu” in Lenape) as “Alligewinengk”.

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Nearly all credible historians equate the Rechahechrian with ancestors to the Cherokee as they became known in the eighteenth century, and that these were Erie refugees from the north.  A few erroneously identify them as a band of Yuchi.  Likewise, no one I can think of has ever suggested the Rickohockan of Lederer’s account were a different people than the Rechahechrian.

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While many identify Lederer’s Rickohockan with Gabriel Arthur’s Tomahitan of 1673, the two accounts negate that identification of the Tomahitan.  The two encountered their respective groups just three years apart at the same town on Occaneechi Island.  Had they been the same people, the Occaneechi would have undoubtedly called them by the same name.  I also doubt the Rickohockan would have shown up again in 1673 to be murdered as they were in 1670.  Others suggest the Tomahitan were a band of Yuchi or else the group later assimilated into the Creek Confederacy as the Tamahita, either of which is more likely than the first assertion.

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According to James Mooney, the year 1708 was when the last town of the Cherokee in the north was burned by the Lenape, though after the “Cherokee” had departed, not with them still inside it.  We can’t know if these people were remnant Erie, some other Iroquoians, or another tribe which ultimately sought refuge with the Cherokee in the south.  It could very well have been an outpost from the Cherokee of the south in the same way  during the Revolution and the Northwest Indian War there were Cherokee settlements in the Ohio Country.

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It was on one of the Cherokee forays in the north during the wars with the Seneca in the eighteenth century that a young Nipissing child was taken south for adoption.  The Nipissing had once been allies of the Huron and suffered their fate.  That Nipissing child grew into a man named Attakullakulla, and he married a Natchez woman from the group along Notchy Creek, who gave birth to four sons along with several daughters.

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These sons, later known as Dragging Canoe, Little Owl, Badger, and Turtle-at-Home, were the greatest war leader the Cherokee (or Erie) ever knew and his warrior brothers.  Ironically, none would be eligible for membership in any of the three federally-recognized Cherokee tribes.  Neither would William Holland Thomas not John Rogers, second Principal Chief of the Eastern Band and last Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation West respectively.
Conclusions

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Fairly simple and straightforward.

First, there was no room for the Cherokee in the Appalachian Summit, Ridge and Valley region, and the Carolina Piedmont to have existed the area at the time of first contact.

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Second, the Cherokee were a multi-ethnic people descended from a core of former Erie or Riqueronon-Rechahecrian-Rickhockan who assimilated remnants of locals where they settled in the Old Southwest and refugee bands of other Southern tribes.

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The idea of Cherokee origin in the South that began spreading at the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and maintained throughout the twentieth century even by normally diligent authorities such as Swanton and Hudson came about for a variety of reasons.  Part of it is and was love for historical myth rather than historical reality, part is political, and part is economic in terms of tourist industry.  To me, the truth is a hell of a lot more interesting.

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Bibliography

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* Alvord, Charles Walworth, and Lee Bidgwood, ed.  The First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians.  (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clarke Co., 1912).
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* Beahm, Emily Lynn.  “Mississippian Polities in the Middle Cumberland Region of Tennessee”. Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia, 2013.
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* Beck, Robin A.  “Catawba Coalescence and the Shattering of the Carolina Piedmont, 1540-1675”.  Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade in the American South, Robbie Franklyn Ethridge and Sherri Marie Shuck-Hall, ed.  (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
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* Beck, Robin A. “From Joara to Chiaha: Spanish Exploration of the Appalachian Summit Area, 1540-1568”.  Southeastern Archaeology, Vol. 16, No. 2.  (Lawrence: Allen Press, Inc., 1997).
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* Beck, Robin A.  Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South.  (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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* Blakely, Robert L., and David R. Matthews.  “Bioarchaeological Evidence for a Spanish-Native American Conflict in the Sixteenth-Century”.  American Antiquity, Vol. 55, No. 4.  (Washington: Society for American Archaeology, 1990).
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* Brose, David.  “Penumbral Protohistory on Lake Erie’s South Shore”.  Societies in Eclipse: Arachaeology of the Eastern Woodlands Indians, 1400-1700.  David Brose, et al., ed.  (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
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* DePratter, Chester B, et al.  “The Route of Juan Pardo's Explorations in the Interior Southeast, 1566-1568”.  Notebook, Volume 19, Issue 1-4.  (Columbia: South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1987).
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* Evans, E. Raymond, and Vicky Karhu. “Williams Island: A Source of Significant Material in the Collections of the Museum of the Cherokee”. Journal of Cherokee Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 10–34. (Cherokee: Museum of the Cherokee Indian, 1984).
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* Gallay, Allen.  The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717.  (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002).
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* Hudson, Charles.  Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms. (Savannah: University of Georgia Press, 1997).
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* Hudson, Charles.  “Spanish-Coosa Alliance in Sixteenth-Century North Georgia”.  (Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1988).
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* Marcoux, Jon Bernard.  Pox, Empire, Shackles, and Hides: The Townsend Site, 1670-1715.  (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).
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* Schroedl, Gerald F., et al.  “Explaining Mississippian Origins in East Tennessee”.  The Mississippian Emergence.  Bruce Smith, ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).
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* Schroedl, Gerald F.  “Mississippian Towns in the Eastern Tennessee Valley”.  Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar, R. Barry Lewis and Charles Stout, ed.  (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998).
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* Starr, Emmet. History of the Cherokee Indians, and their Legends and Folklore. (Fayetteville: Indian Heritage Assn., 1967).
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* Sullivan, Lynne P.  “Mississippian Household and Community Organization in Eastern Tennessee”.  Mississipian Communities and Households, J. Daniel Rogers and Bruce D. Smith, ed.  (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995).
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* Sullivan, Lynne P.  “Reconfiguring the Chickamauga Basin”.  Frank H. McClung Museum, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2011.
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* Swanton, John R.  “The Kaskinampo Indians and Their Neighbors”.  American Anthropologist, Vol. 32, No. 3.  (Arlington: American Anthropological Association, 1930).
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* Williams, Samuel Cole.  Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, 1540–1800. (Johnson City: Watauga Press, 1928).
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* Worth, John E.  “An Ethnohistorical Synthesis of Southeastern Chiefdoms: How does Coosa compare?”.  Paper, 60th Southeastern Archaeological Conference symposium “Coosa: Twenty Years Later”, 2003.

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