Eight hundred years ago, across the southeastern region of North America, the great Mississippian civilization flourished. Artisans crafted stone and metal into objects of sublime beauty. Farmers grew vast fields of corn on the river bottomlands. Laborers raised up enormous flat-topped mounds, some as tall as 100 feet and with enough space at the top to accommodate a modern-day football field. On those mounds dwelt an elite caste of priests who ruled over their people in peace and war.
When Europeans arrived in the 1500s, the Mississippian world was already dwindling away. One likely cause was climate change: the Little Ice Age began in the 1300s and continued through the 1700s. With cooler temperatures, crop yields suffered, upsetting every other aspect of life in the once-mighty Mississippian societies.
Art was neglected. Fields went fallow. Vast plazas and mounds were deserted. Priests lost their power and prestige.
More than all the other descendants of the Mississippians, the Natchez kept the old traditions alive, well into the 18th century. The homeland of the Natchez was the lower Mississippi River Valley, where they observed an ancient caste system with a demigod called the Great Sun as their paramount leader.
The Spanish and the French colonizing the Gulf Coast targeted the Natchez for enslavement in the early 1700s, and for many years the Natchez skirmished with the French. The Great Sun died in 1728, and soon thereafter an uprising by the Natchez ended with their crushing defeat.
Driven from their homeland, remnant bands of survivors sought aid from the Creek, the Catawba and the Cherokee. One Natchez group settled among the Overhill Cherokee near the confluence of the Little Tennessee and Tellico rivers. Eventually, their village was called Natchey Town, and a nearby stream still bears the name Notchy Creek.
Around 1740, the Natchez on the Little Tennessee crossed the mountains to the Hiwassee, near a Cherokee village and mound in Peachtree Valley, east of present-day Murphy, North Carolina. Cornelius Doherty, the first white trader among the Cherokees on the Hiwassee, encouraged them to take in the Natchez, explaining that even though they were small in number, their alliance would strengthen the Cherokee. The Natchez settled on the northern bank of the river directly across from a granite petroglyph depicting a horned serpent. The Cherokee name for the site was Gwalgahi, meaning “Frog Place.”
While the Cherokees welcomed their new neighbors, they did regard them as “a race of wizards and conjurers.” Known throughout the Southeast for their wealth of ritual knowledge, the Natchez were unrivalled as dance leaders. The sights and sounds of their ceremonial dances in the Peachtree Valley must have been unlike anything witnessed before or since in the southern mountains. They preserved their unique culture by discouraging marriage outside the tribe, speaking their own language and holding their own councils.
The Natchez settlement on the Hiwassee continued until 1820, when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Board acquired the land for a mission, school and farm. To make way for the mission, the Natchez moved five miles southeast where they joined Cherokees residing on Brasstown Creek.
Though the Natchez integrated more fully into Cherokee society, they never completely abandoned their heritage. A woman named Alkini, of full Natchez blood, lived among the Cherokee until her death in 1895. She was remembered for speaking with a drawling tone that was distinctly Natchez.
Ties between the Natchez and the Cherokee extended beyond their living in close proximity. The renowned Cherokee statesman of the 18th century, Attakullakulla, lived for a while in Natchey Town on the Little Tennessee. He married Nionne Ollie, who was born Natchez, taken captive as a child, and adopted into the Cherokee tribe. Their son, Dragging Canoe (1738-1792) became a war chief of the Chickamauga Cherokee. His fiery defiance was the extreme opposite of his father’s cool diplomacy.
After the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals ceded a large tract of Cherokee land, and 65 years before the Trail of Tears, this offspring of a Natchez-born mother anticipated the future struggles of the Cherokee and the shared fate of the Natchez in their midst:
“We had hoped that the white men would not be willing to travel beyond the mountains. Now that hope is gone. They have passed the mountains, and have settled upon Cherokee land. When that is gained, the same encroaching spirit will lead them upon other land of the Cherokees, and the remnant of the people, once so great and formidable, will be compelled to seek refuge in some distant wilderness. Should we not therefore run all risks, and incur all consequences, rather than submit to further loss of our country? Such treaties may be alright for men who are too old to hunt or fight. As for me, I have my young warriors about me. We will hold our land.”