Cherokee County before the Cherokee
by Bruce Baker
I’ve often heard people refer to the Cherokee as “the original inhabitants” of the area. A visit to the Carolyn Smith Galt Gallery at History Cherokee is well worth it, as you’ll find the Cherokee were relative latecomers to this county. And for those with an interest in learning what the Americas were really like before Europeans arrived, I can’t recommend Charles Mann’s book “1491” highly enough. This National Bestseller is well researched and shows that large numbers of peoples were living and thriving throughout the Americas prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
Let’s take a moment to focus on who and what the first Europeans encountered when they entered what is now Georgia for the first time. The first Europeans to set foot in Georgia were Spanish, not English, and the arrived long before Virginia’s Jamestown Settlement of 1607 or Massachusetts’ Plymouth Colony of 1620. In 1539, Spanish explorers led by Hernando DeSoto landed near Florida’s Tampa Bay. Around 600 men and 220 horses then spent the winter of 1539-1540 in what we now know as Tallahassee. The modern city carries the name from the Apalachee tribe (now extinct, but who spoke a Muskogean based language), who were already there when the Spanish arrived.
In March of 1540, DeSoto and his men crossed into Georgia. Traversing the state by following rivers, they passed through what is now Macon, crossed the Savannah River at what is now Augusta, and traveled into present day South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. From there, they reentered Georgia in July of 1540.
There they encountered the powerful Chief of the Coosa Indians along the Coosawattee River at a location now under Carters Lake. A month later they headed south, making a stop in an Indian village believed to be located where Pine Log Creek Trails are found today, before moving on to a place called Itaba (what we today call the Etowah Indian Mounds in Cartersville, Georgia) where they crossed the Etowah River. De Soto would continue west, eventually crossing the Mississippi River into modern Arkansas before his death in 1542.
Image: Etowah Mounds State Historic Site, Cartersville
DeSoto and his men were looking for gold, and so it’s somewhat ironic that they marched through most of the Georgia Gold Belt without ever realizing it was right under their feet.
The Coosa that DeSoto encountered were in fact part of the Mississippian culture, which extended throughout the Midwestern and Southeastern US. Mann notes that this entire area was filled with people, who traded extensively with one another: Mother of Pearl from the Gulf of Mexico has been found in Manitoba, and Lake Superior copper has been found in Louisiana.
It would be almost 200 years later before the English started settling in Georgia, near Savannah. By then the landscape had changed, and the mound building Mississippian cultures of the mid 1500s had given way to descendants we know as Creek Indians. Creek is a term used by their enemies; they called themselves Maskoki (or Muscogee). A confederacy of several tribes in the Southeastern US that spoke a similar language, it’s to them that we owe the names of some of the rivers that served as the interstate highways of their day, such as the Chattahoochie (“painted rock”) and the Tallapoosa (“grandmother town”).
However, as the English settlers began incursing deeply into the Carolinas, they were displacing a tribe called the Aniyunwiya. These people spoke a language that is part of the Iroquoian language family and not the Muskogean language family. The Aniyunwiya, who would later refer to themselves as Tsalagi, found themselves at odds with the Maskoki already living there. The Maskoki called these people Cherokee, which translates to “people who speak a different language.”
Image: Cherokee Syllabary
Ultimately the Maskoki and Tsalagi people would fight for the land, and in 1755 near modern day Ball Ground a pivotal battle between them known as the Battle of Taliwa (“Taliwa” is a Muscogee word meaning “town”) was fought. Though heavily outnumbered, the Cherokees won this battle decisively, and the Creeks were forced to withdraw from the area. Thus, the Etowah River takes its name from these Tsalagi people, and has been translated as either “large trees” or “edible trees.”
As such, by the time English settlers began mingling with the native population in large numbers, the Creeks were all located south of the Chattahoochie River, and so most of the names of the Cherokee villages are the ones that have survived in this part of Georgia today: Oconee (“the place of the springs”), Dalonige or Dahlonega (“yellow”), Sutali or Suttallee (“sixth,” or “six”). Additionally, the city of Waleska was named by Lewis Reinhardt in honor of the daughter of a Cherokee Chief; her name was Warluskie.
Today in Cherokee County little remains of these native peoples beyond arrowheads and pottery shards, and fish weirs in some of the rivers. Both the Creeks and Cherokees were displaced entirely in 1838 and sent west along the Trail of Tears. And while their voices may have gone silent in our county almost two centuries ago, as you can see many of the words those voices spoke remain. When they left for Oklahoma, neither the Creeks nor the Cherokees would have said goodbye, as their traditional parting phrases always looked ahead. In Tsalagi, it’s Donadagohvi, which means “till we meet again;” and in Muscogee, it’s Tehecakvres, which means “we’ll see you later.”