By Albert V. Goodpasture
There is a bold mountain stream that rises in the Blue Ridge, in North Carolina, cuts its way through the Great Smoky Mountains that separate North Carolina from Tennessee, penetrates the Valley of East Tennessee, and empties itself into the Tennessee River near Loudon. It is now called the Little Tennessee. Its waters are pure and sparkling, its valleys green and inviting, and its hills fair and sunny. It was greatly loved by the Cherokees. Their Overhill towns lay along its southern border from the mouth of Tellico, eastward.
Henry Timberlake, a young Virginia soldier, spent the winter of 1761-2 in these towns, and has left us an account of them, with a map giving their names and locations.1 For my purpose, it will be necessary to mention only four of them—Tennessee and Echota, governed by Oconostota, the great warrior and principal chief of the Nation; and Mialaquo and Tuskegee, governed by the renowned Attakullakulla, remarkable for the peaceable attitude he always maintained towards his white neighbors. Tennessee, which has given its name to the State of Tennessee and its great river, was the earliest known
Mr. A. V. Goodpasture, author of the article on the Paternity of Sequoyah in this issue of The Chronicles of Oklahoma is one of the foremost students of Indian and Southern history in his section of the country. Mr. Goodpasture is a native of Tennessee and now resides on his country estate near Clarksville, Tennessee. The following are some of his publications:
Indian Wars and Warriors of the Old Southwest.
Geographical Influence in the First Settlement of Tennessee.
The Watauga Association.
Richard Henderson and Western Expansion.
Wm. Blount and the Old Southwest Territory.
Dr. James White, Pioneer, Politician, Lawyer.
Andrew Jackson, Tennessee and the Union.
John Bell’s Revolt against the Jackson Regime.
Education and the Public Lands in Tennessee.
Pepys and The Original Proprietors of Carolina.
Also Joint author with Dr. W. R. Garrett of a History of Tennessee, and with W. H. Goodpasture of a Life of Jefferson Dillard Goodpasture.
He is at present a member of the Tennessee History Committee, and was formerly a Secretary of the Tennessee Historical Society, and Editor of the American Historical Magazine when that periodical became the organ of the Historical Society.
capital of the Cherokee Nation; while Echota, with its namesake, New Echota, were its capitals from the time of Oconostota until the western emigration. Mialaquo was the early home of the able, but irreconcilable chief, Dragging Canoe, who split off from the old tribe, and founded the celebrated Chickamauga towns; and Tuskegee, its sister village, lying under the walls of Fort Loudon, about five miles from Echota, was the birth-place of the great Cherokee syllabist, Sequoya, who is also called George Guess, or Guest, or, more correctly, Gist, presumably after his father. Sequoya is believed to have been born about the time the famous fortress of Fort Loudon was taken by the Cherokees, in 1760. This approximate date seems to be fairly established by Sequoya himself. An Iroquois peace delegation visited the Cherokees at Echota about the year 1770.2 Sequoya, then a small boy living with his mother at Tuskegee, was present at this treaty, and was old enough to remember some of its incidents, which he detailed to his cousin, James Wafford. He must, therefore, have been something near ten years of age at the time, which would fix the date of his birth at about the year 1760.
Sequoya continued to reside at Tuskegee until he was, probably, thirty-two years of age. Dragging Canoe, formerly of Mialaquo, died in his bed at Running Water, about the first of March, 1792, and Colonel John Watts, of Echota, was invited to take his place as principal chief of the Chickamaugas. Watts accepted the position, but did not settle at Running Water, nor, indeed, at any of the five original Chickamauga towns. He chose to fix the seat of his government at Willstown, on the Coosa River, in the present State of Alabama. The encroachments of the white 