Eyewitnesses who were never called to the witness stand

Between about 1585 and 1600 AD, something catastrophic happened in the Southern Highlands.  The effects are most notable in northwest Georgia, southeast Tennessee and the northwestern North Carolina Mountains.  A native population remained in the heartland of the Apalache “kingdom” in the north-central and northeast mountains of Georgia. In fact the large town of Ustanoli on an island in the Tugaloo River was not sacked and burned until after 1700.  It was eventually replaced by a Cherokee hamlet.

All mound building stopped.  Some of the largest indigenous towns north of Mexico were suddenly abandoned.  Archeologists working in northwestern Georgia found a village in which skeletons were scattered haphazardly across the landscape, as if all died with no one left to bury the dead. In another nearby village they found a cache of adolescent bones, chopped into meal-size chunks by sharp steel weapons.  Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s farmers in northern Georgia plowed up the remains of rusting European weapons and armor from the late 1500s or early 1600s.  The vestiges of the past sparked dozens of folklore tales that “De Soto Slept Here.”

Archaeologists have speculated that a massive plague caused by a European pathogen killed most of the indigenous population in a few days or weeks.  The long concealed evidence says something else.  There was an invasion of Europeans into the mountains at the end of the 16^th century. Perhaps these newcomers carried with them the pathogens which killed so many indigenous peoples, but there is a lingering suspicion that they also used their superior weapons to conquer.

In 1976 the State of North Carolina adopted as an official state policy that the Cherokee Tribe had occupied all of western North Carolina, lived in North Carolina for at least 1,000 years and possibly had lived there for 10,000 years. Southeastern anthropological texts written after 1976 typically omitted the many historical archives that describe peoples other than the Cherokees living in the Southern Appalachians.  Frequently these same authors labeled standard, contemporary Creek words found in the De Soto and Pardo chronicles as “ancient Cherokee words whose meanings have been lost.” 1

Also, since 1976, many prehistoric archaeological sites in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and northern Georgia have been labeled “Cherokee” even though the archaeologists did not carry out DNA forensics to determine ethnic identity. Archaeological sites in northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee that contained European artifacts were automatically assumed to be Cherokee, even though Cherokees occupied a minute section of Georgia until after the American Revolution.  The sites could have been occupied by Europeans. Otherwise, they could have been occupied by other Native American ethnic groups.  Although there are currently no generally accepted DNA markers for the federally recognized Southeastern tribes, Muskogean DNA will usually include Maya, Totonac and/or Tupi-Guarani DNA markers, for which there are accepted standards. 2

When researching the early history of the Southern Highlands, one must always use the original text. During the last quarter of the 20^th century, historians from North Carolina arbitrarily changed the ethnic names of indigenous peoples when editing 17^th and 18^th century documents into modern English.  Almost always the change was from a Muskogean, Yuchi, Shawnee or Algonquian ethnic group name to Cherokee. Any time an online encyclopedia mentions the word “Cherokee” before 1700, it is fabricated history.  The first use of the word “Cherokee” in an official document is in a South Carolina act, dated 1717.   The act was associated with efforts to provide permanent defenses along the trade route labeled the “Cherokee Path.”

Another change that late 20^th century North Carolina and Cherokee historians made, when “modernizing” the texts of colonial archives, involved the Shawnee.  These scholars inserted statements that Shawnee temporarily lived on the Savannah River in Georgia and in a few villages in the Blue Ridge Foothills as guests of the Cherokees, but were driven out when they misbehaved.

In actuality, the Shawnee were shown by European mapmakers and archives to live in western North Carolina and Savannah River Basin for over century before the word, Cherokee, appeared. 3   The name of the Swannanoa River in Asheville, NC is derived from the Creek Indian words, Suwani Owa, which mean “Shawnee River.” During the 1700s a large Shawnee town was located in present day Asheville, where Biltmore Village is now located.  Creek Indians lived in the vicinity of present day Hendersonville and Brevard, NC during that era.  The name of Etowah, North Carolina is a vestige of their presence.

Citations:

1. One of the best examples of the “Ancient Cherokee word thing” is Chiaha.  It was a large capital town on an island in a mountain river, that was visited by both Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo.  Many references call it “the Cherokee town of Chiaha” merely because the town was in the North Carolina Mountains. Chiaha is an Itza Maya word, meaning “Salvia River.”  The people of Chiaha were driven out of the North Carolina Mountains by Cherokee raiders.  They resettled in SW Georgia and joined the Creek Confederacy.[↩]
2. Marks, Jonathon & Shelton, Brent Lee,  “Genetic “Markers”- Not a Valid Test of Native Identity,” Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism.[↩]
3. Guilluame DeLisle’s maps of North America and the Province of Louisiana always showed Shawnees, Muskogeans and Yuchi‘s living in Tennessee and along the Savannah River. Until 1718, DeLisle also showed the same three ethnic groups living in western North Carolina.[↩]