The Cherokee considered warfare a polluting activity, and warriors required the purification by the priestly class before participants could reintegrate into normal village life.

In the 1700s, a Cherokee village was located just west of the main cave entrance, before the people were pushed out by encroaching European-American settlers.

What became Blountsville appears on an 1819 map as the mixed Creek / Cherokee Indian village of " Wassausey " ( meaning Bear Meat Cabin, the name of an Indian translator who lived there ).

In the 19th century, the site of Fort Payne was the location of Willstown, an important village of the Cherokees who relocated to Tahlequah, Oklahoma during the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

: For the Overhill Cherokee village in Tennessee, see Tallassee ( Cherokee town ).

Adairsville used to be a small Cherokee village named after Chief Walter ( John ) S. Adair, a Scottish settler who married a Cherokee Indian woman before the removal of the Cherokee in 1838.

Watkinsville was a village located on the dangerous western frontier of the new United States between Creek and Cherokee territories.

Several mixed white and Cherokee families also lived in or near the present site of Little Town, likely just east of the village in the Cherokee Neutral Lands or to the south, near Chetopa.

A village on this site was called " Red Banks " by the Cherokee who historically lived and hunted there, because of the reddish clay soil on the tall banks of the river.

After Tryon, de Soto went to Gauxuile ( now Asheville ) which in Cherokee meant " The place where they race ", named for the walk around the perimeter of the village.

The village of Kituhwa, which the Cherokee believed to be their oldest village, was located along the Tuckasegee immediately upstream from Bryson City.

Jamestown was built upon the site of a semi-permanent Cherokee village, which probably made use of the many natural rock shelters in the area.

By the time Euro-American explorers and settlers arrived in the area in the 18th century, the villages of the Overhill Cherokee dominated the river, stretching from the village of Tallassee ( near modern Calderwood ) to Mialoquo ( near the modern US-411 bridge ).

The City of Madisonville originally began as the town of Tellico, and prior to that a Cherokee village of the same name.

A Cherokee village, headed by Chief Tollunteeskee, was situated just across the river, at what is now Rockwood.

A Cherokee village situated in what is now Rockwood was the headquarters of Chief Tallentuskie, a Cherokee leader in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The area was first large farms and ranches, and took its name from the Cherokee word for " village of many springs.

These villages included Tanasi, the namesake for the state of Tennessee, and Chota, the capital and most prominent Cherokee village in the 18th century.

In 1830, the majority of the " Five Civilized Tribes "— the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee — were living east of the Mississippi as they had for thousands of years.

The British were supported in the war by the Iroquois, and also by the Cherokee — until differences sparked the Anglo-Cherokee War in 1758.

However, in Worcester v. Georgia ( 1832 ), the Court ruled that Georgia could not impose laws in Cherokee territory, since only the national government — not state governments — had authority in Indian affairs.

By the late 17th-century, however, the Cherokee — whose ancestors were living in the mountains at the time of the Spaniards ' visit — had become the dominant tribe in the region.

The war itself finally ended with the surrender of the last Confederate army — Cherokee General Stand Watie's forces, who surrendered at Fort Towson in June 1865, over two months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia -- and with it any chance of Confederate success.

An act of December 3, 1832 divided the Cherokee lands into ten new counties — Cass ( later renamed Bartow ), Cherokee, Cobb, Floyd, Forsyth, Gilmer, Lumpkin, Murray, Paulding, and Union.

Cobb, along with several other counties in the same bill, was created December 3, 1832, by the Georgia General Assembly from the huge Cherokee " county " territory — land northwest of the Chattahoochee River which the state confiscated from the Cherokee Nation and redistributed to settlers via lottery, following the passage of the federal Indian Removal Act .< ref >

In 1767 William Tryon, Governor of North Carolina ( 1765 — 1771 ), alerted to the heavy bloodshed in this part of western North Carolina, traveled to the area and negotiated peace treaty with the Cherokee, establishing a boundary line between a location near Greenville, South Carolina the highest point on White Oak Mountain ( renamed Tryon Peak by the settlers ).

Lake Region Electric Cooperative — LREC provide electricity to most of Cherokee and surrounding counties.

* The Cherokee Chronicle — Newspaper, serving Cherokee County, is published Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The park's other two entrances — one just south of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the other just north of Cherokee, North Carolina — are home to multiple commercial attractions that draw millions of tourists annually.

" Early issues of the Knoxville Gazette — the first newspaper published in Tennessee — are filled with accounts of murder, theft, and hostile Cherokee attacks.

The Five Civilized Tribes were the five Native American nations — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole — that were considered civilized by Anglo-European settlers during the colonial and early federal period because they adopted many of the colonists ' customs and had generally good relations with their neighbors.

A few years later, after the Treaty of Long Island, Dragging Canoe and his now considerably grown number of followers, removed themselves further from the other Cherokee villages — as well as the Euro-American settlements — by following the Tennessee River further downstream into the remote area of the Chickamauga River ( near modern day Chattanooga ).

In this capacity he negotiated several treaties, one of the most important being with Cherokee chief John Ross, which was concluded in 1861.

Later known as Elias Boudinot, he was editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the nation's first newspaper, which was published in Cherokee and English.

* 1839 – Cherokee leaders Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot are assassinated for signing the Treaty of New Echota, which had resulted in the Trail of Tears.

Also, he oversaw the " Trail of Tears ", which involved the expulsion of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole from Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina to the Oklahoma territory.

The Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for / s /, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial / sC / consonant cluster.

His deal violated an existing treaty between the United States government and the Cherokee Nation, which guaranteed its people the right to their historic lands.

The Cherokee refer to themselves as Tsalagi () or Aniyvwiyaʔi (), which means " Principal People.

The other theory, which is disputed by academic specialists, is that the Cherokee had been in the Southeast for thousands of years.

Precontact Cherokee are considered to be part of the later Pisgah Phase of Southern Appalachia, which lasted from circa 1000 to 1500.

In contrast, a large portion of the settlers encroaching on their territories and against whom the Cherokee ( and other Indians ) took most of their actions were Scots-Irish, Irish from Ulster of Scottish descent, a group which also provided the backbone for the forces of the Revolution ( a famous example of a Scots-Irishman doing the reverse is Simon Girty ).

Andrew Jackson said the removal policy was an effort to prevent the Cherokee from facing extinction as a people, which he considered the fate that " the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware " had suffered.

William Holland Thomas, a white store owner and state legislator from Jackson County, North Carolina, helped over 600 Cherokee from Qualla Town obtain North Carolina citizenship, which exempted them from forced removal.

The Cherokee speak a Southern Iroquoian language, which is polysynthetic and is written in a syllabary invented by Sequoyah ().

Many words, however, have been borrowed from the English language, such as gasoline, which in Cherokee is ().

* The 1835 the Treaty of New Echota established terms under which the entire Cherokee Nation was expected to cede its territory in the Southeast and move to Indian Territory.

His earlier life included migration to Tennessee from Virginia, time spent with the Cherokee Nation ( into which he later was adopted as a citizen and into which he married ), military service in the War of 1812, and successful participation in Tennessee politics.

In 1830 and 1832 Houston visited Washington, DC, to expose the frauds which government agents committed against the Cherokee.

Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek.

While retaining their tribal governance, which included a constitution or official council in tribes such as the Iroquois and Cherokee, many portions of the southeastern Native American nations had become partially or completely economically integrated into the economy of the region.

In 1838, the Cherokee people were forcibly removed from their lands in the Southeastern United States to the Indian Territory ( present day Oklahoma ) in the Western United States, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 4, 000 Cherokees.

The Cherokee Trail of Tears resulted from the enforcement of the Treaty of New Echota, an agreement signed under the provisions of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which exchanged Native American land in the East for lands west of the Mississippi River, but which was never accepted by the elected tribal leadership or a majority of the Cherokee people.