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From Knott Historical Society's Native American Dept.
Director, Debra Kelly-Thomas.
In looking forward to Christmas and the Upcoming New Year,
thoughts of Family & Friends enter my mind. Those that have long been a part
of my life, as well as the newly found that have touched my life. I wish each
and every one of you a Joyous and Love Filled Holiday Season. My Best Wishes to
You and Yours.
I would like to take this time to give my
Sincere Thanks and Appreciation to those that are working very hard to bring
recognition to the Native American People of Kentucky. A Few of Which I will
name below.
Governor Ernie Fletcher - Thank You for
Recognizing the First People of the State of Kentucky, and of This Country, the
Native Americans. I Stand and Applaud You for this Recognition of Our People.
It has been so long overdue. Your Support will Never be
forgotten.
Kenneth B. Tankersley, Ph.D., Native
American Studies and Anthropology - A Shining Example of his work I am posting
below, an Excerpt from his Book entitled KENTUCKY CHEROKEE: People of the
Cave, copyright 2004 by Dr. Tankersley.
While getting Ready to Enjoy the Holidays with
Your Families and Friends... Take a Moment to Be Thankful for All the Blessings
in Your Lives, Large and Small. Then Take a Moment and Imagine, If All
Creation Were to Sing the Same Song.
tsisa
udenv gohi iga
(Merry
Christmas),
Debra
Kelly-Thomas
nativeamerican@coollist.com
Director of
Native American Heritage,
Knott County
Historical Society, Inc.
A Very Special Thank You to David R. Smith,
President of the Knott County Historical Society, for your Tireless and Never
Ending Dedication, to the Accurate Preservation of The History of The People of
Eastern Kentucky. Very Few Know the Depth of Your Dedication and the Hardships
You've Endured, in Your Efforts to Make Available Accurate Histories of the
Pioneering People of our Region. My Respect and Best Wishes to You for Wonderful
Christmas and a Prosperous and Happy New
Year.
Enjoy this Wonderful Excerpt from Dr. Tankersleys' Book:
Kentucky Cherokee: People of the
Cave
For more than 200 years, American
historians have argued that the Cherokee never lived in Kentucky; rather, it was
a hunting ground, a middle ground for all Indians, which was at the center of
many dark and bloody disputes. Actually, many Nations of American Indians have
lived in Kentucky since time immemorial.
John Filson, an
opportunistic investor, land speculator, and entrepreneur, created this myth and
many others in a book, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke,
published five years after his death in 1788. The book included "an account of
Indian Nations inhabiting within the limits of the thirteen United States, their
manners and customs, and reflections of their origin." It told readers that
there were no Indians living in Kentucky, they were located in the other states.
Filson emphasized that the Cherokee and other Nations had no valid claim to
Kentucky because it was originally settled by an ancient white race that greatly
predated the Indians. Ironically, the very people Filson claimed did not live in
Kentucky killed him.
Top
Filson's book was widely printed and
circulated in England, France, and Germany as a way to entice Europeans to
immigrate to the United States and settle in Kentucky. To further allure them to
this new land of opportunity, Filson created a story about John Swift and his
lost silver mine. This story emphasized that Kentucky was a land filled with
riches just waiting to be taken.
Unfortunately, all of
Filson's myths about the native people of Kentucky were perpetuated and
elaborated upon in subsequent books on the history of the state such as Lewis
Collins' 1847 Historical Sketches of Kentucky, Richard Collins' and Lewis
Collins' 1874 History of Kentucky, Bennett Young's 1910 The Prehistoric Men of
Kentucky, and W. D. Funkhouser's and W. S. Webb's 1928 Ancient Life in Kentucky.
To make matters worse, these myths are still being taught in some quarters of
the state today.
The Cherokee call themselves Tsa'lagi', the
Real People or the Principal People. The word Cherokee comes from the 1557
Portuguese narrative of DeSoto's expedition, which was then written as Chalaque.
It is derived from the Choctaw word, choluk, which means cave. Mohawk call the
Cherokee Oyata'ge'ronoñ, which means people who live in caves or in the cave
country. In Catawba, the Cherokee are called Mañterañ, which translates as the
people who come out of the ground.
Kentucky is the land of
caves, home to the longest cave in the world, and home of the Cherokee. Kentucky
caves are full of evidence of Cherokee people, from salt and crystal mines to
exploration and habitation. As the Cherokee explored Kentucky for the first
time, they came across the entrances of great caves, some of which were filled
with mineral resources that extended many miles underground. They ventured into
caves in search of protection from the elements, to mine minerals, to dispose of
their dead, to conduct ceremonies, and to explore the unknown, as indicated by
the footprints, pictographs, petroglyphs, mud glyphs, stone tools, and
sculptures they left behind. Wherever the Cherokee found a dry cave in Kentucky
with a reasonably accessible opening, they entered and explored it
systematically.
Top
Before European colonization, Kentucky was a
significant part of the Cherokee country, representing the northern quarter of
the Cherokee Nation since time immemorial. Its boundaries extended to the Ohio
River in the north, the Cumberland River in the west, and the Great Kanawha
River in the east. By the end of the American Revolution, the northern boundary
of the Cherokee country was moved southward to encompass the land below the
Cumberland River. At the Final Cession, some 38,000 square miles of Cherokee
land in Kentucky had been extorted in what some call the Trail of Broken
Treaties between the English and United States.
The earliest
known contact with Europeans occurred in 1540, when a party of warriors
successfully defended the northwestern border of the Cherokee country against
the advances of Hernando DeSoto and his Spanish soldiers. They were forced to
retreat to the north side of the Ohio River at present-day Fort Massac,
Illinois.
After the English arrived on the present site of
Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, there was continuous contact with Cherokee from
Kentucky as English traders strengthened their alliances and worked their way
into the Appalachian Mountains. Perhaps the earliest evidence of an English
trader with Cherokee in Kentucky is in Wolfe County, where a date of 1717 and
five or six traditional symbols of Anitsisqua, the Cherokee Bird Clan, are
incised on a sandstone outcrop overlooking Panther Branch.
Cherokee claims to Kentucky were seriously challenged when the Tuscarawas joined
the League of the Iroquois (Iroquois Confederacy, Haudenosaunee, People of the
Longhouse including the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas) in
1722. They expanded by alliance and conquest deep into the state. The newly
formed Six Nations took over control of all of the land north of the Cumberland
River.
By 1729, the Shawnee were serving as guides into
northern Kentucky for the French military who considered Kentucky part of New
France. At this time, the Cherokee were busy fighting the Choctaw, Creek, and
Yamasee to the south for their English allies. As a gesture of thanks, Sir
Alexander Cuming took seven of the principal Cherokee Chiefs to England with him
in 1730, including Oukah (King) Ulah, brother of Moytoy, uncle of Wilenawa
(Great Eagle), father of many well-known Kentucky Cherokee leaders including
Doublehead, born in McCreary County. Although this visit strengthened allegiance
with the British, the Cherokee population in Kentucky and elsewhere was cut in
half by smallpox just eight years later, making it difficult to defend their
northern borders. To make matters worse, the Creek and Choctaw had allied
themselves with the French.
At the onset of the French and
Indian War (1750-1754), Cherokee, Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot leaders seeking
inter-tribal peace traveled back and forth through Kentucky on the Great Warrior
Road en route to council meetings with representatives of the Six Nations. While
the Cherokee were granted permission from the Six Nations to return to their
land north of the Cumberland River, it was a political exchange for their
partisan position against the French and all villages sympathetic to French
traders. As part of the peace agreement, Shawnee families began to spend winters
with the Cherokee, and Cherokee warriors began to spend time with the
Shawnee.
During the French and Indian War (1754-1763),
blockades cut off salt shipments from the West Indies. Salt springs and licks in
Kentucky became an important resource to the colonists. Shawnee made salt at Big
Bone Lick (Boone County) and Blue Licks (Nicholas County) in the north, the
Cherokee made salt and buried their dead along Goose Creek, near the mouth of
Collins Creek, in Clay County. The abundance of salt in Kentucky, north and
south did not escape the eyes of the Europeans and later became an issue of
national importance.
With the signing of the Treaty of Paris
in 1763, France gave up all claims to Kentucky and its resources. In exchange
for their help during the war, the British victors proclaimed that Kentucky was
to be recognized as Indian Territory and no person could make a treaty with the
Cherokee or buy land from them without their permission. While the treaty of
1763 allowed the Cherokee to retain all of their land in Kentucky, their
possession was short-lived.
Top
In 1768, the British
superintendent of Indian Affairs convinced the Cherokee to cede their holdings
in what is today the state of Virginia to prevent conflicts with encroaching
colonists. Most of the contact with the settlers in Kentucky was friendly, as
evidenced by the autumn 1769 meeting of Long Hunters with Cherokee Chief Dick
(namesake of Dick's River) and his warriors along Skagg's Creek near the
Rockcastle River. Nevertheless, British representatives later insisted on a new
treaty (October 18, 1770), which moved the northeastern boundary of Cherokee
country from the New River of West Virginia to the land within the extreme
western corner of Kentucky (Pike County). Two years later, England requested yet
another treaty to purchase all of the land between the Ohio and Kentucky rivers.
Not all of the Cherokee agreed with the sale, and fighting broke out along the
Great Warrior Road along Station Camp Creek in Clay County in defense of their
territory. Land speculators considered the 1772 skirmishes as minor incidents
because they wanted to sell central Kentucky to European
immigrants.
Entrepreneur and colonial judge Richard
Henderson, his agent Daniel Boone, and other private citizens met with Cherokee
Chiefs along the Watauga River on March 17, 1775. Henderson and Boone illegally
negotiated the cession of all of the land in between the Kentucky, Ohio, and
Cumberland rivers to the privately owned Transylvania Company. Although it has
become known as the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, the entire event was in direct
violation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. On behalf of England, the colony of
Virginia, which then included Kentucky, revoked the treaty. However, it did not
stop Boone and the Transylvania Company from creating the Wilderness Road, which
opened the way for an unstoppable and limitless flow of European immigrants into
Kentucky and in direct conflict with the Cherokee.
The Treaty
of Sycamore Shoals was negotiated just one month before the beginning of the
American Revolution. Most, but not all, of the Cherokee supported the British
through the war and beyond to 1794. Following the example of the Delaware Chief
Coquetakeghton (White Eyes), who served as a guide and lieutenant colonel in the
American army, a number of Cherokee living in Kentucky agreed to serve as
scouts. At the decisive Battle of Kings Mountain, October 7, 1780, there were
Cherokee warriors from Kentucky fighting on both sides.
By
1782, individual Cherokee political alliances had become extremely complex. Some
traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, to seek protection from the Spanish government,
while others moved north and joined the Shawnee on the Scioto River, getting
supplies and council from the British military. At the same time,
representatives of the Wyandot, Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi traveled to the
Cumberland River valley to council with the Cherokee about joining them in an
all-out war against the United States.
The American
Revolution ended on September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
The Cherokee were not consulted and many did not recognize England's cession of
Kentucky to the United States. To make matters worse, a group of Tennessee
colonists illegally created the State of Franklin with John Sevier as their
Governor. On May 31, 1785, Major Hugh Henry, Sevier, and other representatives
of the self-declared state met with Cherokee Chiefs to negotiate the "Treaty of
Dumplin Creek," which promised to redefine and extend the Cherokee boundary
line. Because the United States government did not recognize the State of
Franklin (1785-1788), the Treaty of Dumplin Creek was deemed illegal. Sevier and
his Franklinites engendered a spirit of distrust between all subsequent
treaty-makers and the Cherokee, which led to many bloody conflicts and,
ultimately, genocide in Kentucky.
The first official treaty
between the United States and Cherokee Nation was negotiated at Hopewell, South
Carolina, on November 28, 1785. The Hopewell Treaty included the cession of all
land in Kentucky north of the Cumberland River and west of the Little South
Fork. Although Cherokee Chief Corn Tassel (brother of Doublehead) signed the
treaty, other leaders of the Paint Clan did not, which began a war between the
Euroamerican settlers and the Cherokee in the Cumberland valley. They fiercely
resented the intrusion of immigrants and were determined upon their expulsion or
extermination.
Top
Many Cherokee warriors from Kentucky joined
the northern confederacy of the Shawnee-Delaware-Wyandot-Miami who continued to
be supplied and encouraged by England to defeat the newly formed country. For
the next thirteen years, they waged war upon the settlements in their land.
Although most American history books do not include this war, it was the first
to be declared by Congress in 1790. It has been referred to as President George
Washington's Indian War ~ the struggle for the old northwest. In December of
1790, Kentucky settlers petitioned Congress to fight the Cherokee in whatever
way they saw fit. A Board of War was appointed, and on May 23, 1791, it
authorized the destruction of Cherokee towns and food resources by burning their
homes and crops.
In an attempt to make peace with the
Cherokee, and redefine the new boundary lines in Kentucky, the United States
negotiated the Treaty of Holston on July 2, 1791. It restated that the Cherokee
land in Kentucky was restricted to the area east of the Little South Fork and
south of the Cumberland River. The treaty was signed by Kentucky Cherokee Chief
Doublehead, his brother, Chief Standing Turkey, their nephew, John Watts, and
witnessed by Thomas Kennedy, representative of Kentucky in the Territory of the
United States South of the Ohio River. Unfortunately, the boundary line remained
unclear and disputed by Cherokee not present at the treaty signing, and the
fighting continued for the next seven years. One of the last skirmishes in
Kentucky occurred at the salt works and Cherokee burial grounds on Goose Creek
in Clay County, on March 28, 1795.
The Treaty of Greenville,
negotiated in Ohio on August 3, 1795, ended the war. It was made between Major
General Anthony Wayne, commander of the army of the United States, and the
Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Miami, Eel River, Wea,
Kickapoo, Piankeshaw, and Kaskaskia. Although the treaty tried to settle
controversies and to restore harmony and friendly intercourse between the United
States and all Indian Nations, Cherokee chiefs, shamans, and warriors were not
permitted to attend. Cherokees who were living north of the Ohio River returned
to their homes in southern Kentucky.
On October 2, 1798, the
first Treaty of Tellico was negotiated with the Cherokee Nation. It allowed for
safe passage of settlers using the Kentucky road, running through Cherokee land
between the Cumberland Mountain and the Cumberland River, in exchange for
hunting rights on all relinquished lands, a further refinement of the Holston
Treaty of 1791.
In 1803, the demand for salt produced on
Cherokee land in Kentucky dramatically increased when England seized American
ships involved in the salt trade. In 1805, the remaining Cherokee land in
Kentucky was considered crucial to the security of the United States. Between
October 25 and 27, 1805, Kentucky Cherokee Chiefs Doublehead and Red Bird singed
the final Treaties of Tellico, ceding the land south of the Cumberland River.
Doublehead was later executed by his own people, who felt they had been betrayed
and sold out.
In 1810, the "War Hawks" were elected to
Congress. They expressed their concern about the "Indian presence" in the East,
and on January 15, 1810, they extinguished all Cherokee land claims in southern
Kentucky. Although Chief Red Bird made every possible concession to maintain
peace between his people and the United States, most of the white settlers made
no distinction between them and the Chickamauga supporting Tecumseh. Sometime in
the late summer or early Fall of 1810, more than 100 innocent Cherokee old men,
women, and children were cruelly massacred at a place known today as Yahoo Falls
in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area of McCreary County,
Kentucky. The bodies of the slaughtered Cherokee were buried in a mass grave in
the rockshelter behind the falls. On January 31, 1811, just months after the
Yahoo Falls massacre, the surrounding Chickamauga lands were granted for sale at
the minimal price of ten cents an acre in order to encourage the development of
salt works. As salt was an expensive commodity at $25.00 a barrel, the local
white settlers who orchestrated the Yahoo Falls massacre purchased the land
containing salt springs and became rich.
The white settlers'
hatred of Red Bird and his people grew, in part, out of their indifference
between the Chickamauga who fought with the Shawnee in the Northwest Territory
against Kentucky troops at Fallen Timbers, Tippecanoe, and the River Raisin, and
Cherokee who fought alongside American forces in the Southeast against the Creek
at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It was this ignorance and arrogance that led to
the murder of Chief Red Bird and his crippled friend Jack in Clay County. They
were brutally attacked in their sleep by a party of white hunters in the river
bottom, just above the mouth of Hector's Creek, on the west side of the Red Bird
River, directly across from its confluence with Jack's Creek where Chief Red
Bird's cabin was located. An angry young man in the party that had lost his
father, some say at the Yahoo Falls massacre, mutilated Chief Red Bird and Jack
with their own tomahawks. The murderers threw the bodies of Red Bird and Jack
into a place called "Willie's Hole," and stole their belongings. Not long after
the crime, Red Bird's longtime friend, John Gilbert, discovered the slaughtered
bodies. The angry young man, said to have had an odd surname, returned to the
scene just as John Gilbert was pulling the bodies ashore. Together, they buried
the elder Cherokee in the sandy floor of a nearby
rockshelter.
After Red Bird's murder, remnants of his people
lived along Little Goose Creek, in Clay County, which was the dividing line
between the Cherokee and white settlers until the end of the Trail of Tears in
1839. Some of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears escaped and secretly joined
their extended families in Clay County. Since then, the Cherokee people of
Kentucky have suffered genocide and today they are subjected to ethnocide.
Ironically, outside of the reserve lands in North Carolina and Oklahoma, there
are more people of Cherokee descent in Kentucky than any other state.