How the Cherokee Learned to Read and Write, Almost Overnight, without Schools

[Please right-click and use View Image on the syllabary below to get a smaller and more manageable view.  I have chosen to post this image in large size so that all details show up well in the smaller views of it.]

[Please right-click and use View Image on the above syllabary to get a smaller and more manageable view.  I have chosen to post this image in large size so that all details show up well in the smaller views of it.]

In the early 1820’s, the majority of the Cherokee people learned to read and write their own language, and they did it without any schools or educational system at all!

They quickly became more literate than the white people who lived around them.

King Seijong of Korea did something very remarkable in the Fifteenth Century.

Seijong was a highly educated man, familiar with Sanskrit and the alphabetic languages of India. He was a voracious reader, and he wanted the people of Korea to read and learn as he did. At the time, the Korean language was written using about 30,000 Chinese characters. [I have been told by a missionary relative of mine, who spent many years in China and Taiwan, that one needs to know about 5,000 characters to read a Chinese newspaper.]

It is definitely not easy for an illiterate adult (or even a well-educated foreigner) to learn to read and write Chinese. It would take many years of constant study. If you have any doubt about that, see how long it would take you to learn to write or read even a dozen Chinese words. Try it!

Seijong knew that writing Korean in Chinese characters kept most of his people from ever learning to read. In 1446, he created the Korean han’gul alphabet of 24 letters–14 consonants and 10 vowels–that is probably the most perfectly suited to its language of any alphabet in existence. Anyone who knows how to speak Korean can learn to read and write it in a few days. There is no need to study spelling at all; if you can say the word, you can write it. And, there are a lot of other things about the Korean alphabet that make it very special, but we won’t go into the details here. It is still in use after nearly 600 years.

Now, King Seijong was not illiterate. He was rich and powerful. He knew a great deal about other languages. He had very wise men to advise him. I think he had a committee of the wisest create the alphabet and got the credit for it. Kings and emperors can do that sort of thing, you know. King James I of England had a collection of scholars translate the Bible into the English of his day; hardly anyone remembers their names or even their existence and the translation is called the “King James Version.” Still, the story goes that King Seijong invented the Korean alphabet himself; he had the intellectual ability to do it, so it is possible that he may really have done it all alone. [Besides, I know from personal experience that it is pretty darn hard to get scholars and professors to try anything new, no matter how good it is, but that is another story for another article.]

The first person in recorded human history who single-handedly created a written form of his own language was [maybe] King Seijong.

Only one other human being ever did the same thing again. He was very different from Seijong. He was born in the woods near what is now Loudon, Tennessee, in 1760 give or take a year or so. He never went to school, because there were no schools in the Cherokee Nation until Sequoyah–that was his Indian name–was more than 40 years old. He never knew his father. He never learned to read and write or speak English in all his life.

There are several different stories about Sequoyah’s ancestry, some of which were invented by white people who wanted to include him as a relative, after he became famous. His mother came from a good Cherokee family; her brother was a chief at Echota [in what is now Monroe County, TN]. She may have had some white blood. But, who was his father? There is no certainty, but I will tell you what I think is the real story.

His father was a half-breed who may have worked for the garrison at old Fort Loudon. His family name was Gist; maybe he was a scout. He moved on shortly and had no part in Sequoyah’s life.

Other people think his father was a white man, maybe an officer at Fort Loudon, or perhaps just a wandering trader. Sometimes, the name was spelled Guest or Guess. Whatever the story, and we will probably never know for sure, Sequoyah was also known as George Gist. (As George Guess, his name appears on a treaty signed in 1816, before he became famous for his syllabary.)

Sequoyah was raised by his mother at the old settlement of Tuskegee, near Fort Loudon. Tuskegee [Cherokee Tasgigi] took its name from some forgotten tribe that had blended in with both the Cherokee and the Creeks; the name occurs in several other places, including in Creek lands in Alabama, from which came the name of Tuskegee University.

Very little is known of Sequoyah’s early life. He seemed to have a special knack for mechanical things.

He worked with silver and other metals and he was a blacksmith. A hunting accident left him partly crippled, and he had more time to tinker around with ideas. In 1809, he began to think about how it was that white people could communicate by marks on paper.

Knowing nothing at all about reading or writing, he began to work on some way the Cherokee people could have a system of writing. He kept trying despite discouragement and ridicule and all sorts of failures. He had little or no paper, so he scratched his ideas on homemade shingles. At least once, all the work that he had done was destroyed and he was accused of being a witch. At first, he tried to draw a picture for each Cherokee word. That way did not work, he found. There were too many words and [we now know] he would have ended up with a written language like Chinese. Besides, he found that it was too tedious to draw so many pictures and he was not much of an artist anyway.

By now, the Cherokee had been forced out of the mountains of eastern Tennessee, and Sequoyah was living at Willstown (about 8 miles southwest of modern Ft. Payne, Alabama), on Will’s Creek. Willstown, Will’s Creek, and Will’s Valley were all named for the mixed-blood Cherokee chief of the area, known to the whites as “Red-Headed Will.”

Sequoyah carefully analyzed the sounds of the Cherokee language, and eventually he realized that there are about 85 syllables that make up all the words of the language. He then set about creating a symbol for every one of those syllable sounds. (At first, he thought about 200 syllables would be needed, but he was able to reduce that to 85; one of the breakthroughs was making a special symbol for the “s” sound, a much more sophisticated idea than would be apparent to a non-linguist.)

It is said that Sequoyah used an old English spelling book someone gave him to find some of the characters he created. Keep in mind that he knew nothing at all of English. About two dozen of the syllabary characters were taken directly from English letters, but the Cherokee sounds have no connection at all with the English sounds. Others were made up by adding lines or curves to various English letters, or by turning them upside down. At least two Greek letters were used. Some numerals [4 and 6] became symbols. The rest were created from whatever could be found.

In 1821, he turned the syllabary over to the most important men of the Tribe for testing. It was astonishingly successful. Here is what James Mooney had to say about it:

“The invention of the alphabet had an immediate and wonderful effect on Cherokee development. On account of the remarkable adaptation of the syllabary to the language, it was only necessary to learn the characters to be able to read at once. No schoolhouses were built and no teachers hired, but the whole Nation became an academy for the study of the system, until, in the course of a few months, without school or expense of time or money, the Cherokee were able to read and write in their own language . . . teaching each other in the cabins and along the roadside.”

Cherokee people began proudly to send written messages to one another, even to next-door neighbors, and the Eastern people began to exchange correspondence with the Western Cherokee, those people who had already moved to Arkansas and Oklahoma territories before the Removal.

The missionaries (as would be expected) did not like the new alphabet, because Indian “savages” had created it. However, they soon caught on that it would be helpful to them, so they accepted it. By 1825, the New Testament had been translated into Cherokee. [I have a modern copy of it here on my desk.] One missionary took a copy of a translation of the book of Matthew to Yonaguska, the greatest Eastern Cherokee chief, and read one or two chapters to him. The old chief commented: “Well, it seems to be a good book–strange that the white people are not better, after having had it so long.”

Sequoyah, by the way, never became a convert to Christianity; he continued all his life in the old beliefs. In 1822, he took the syllabary to the Arkansas Band of the Cherokee. In 1823, he moved permanently to the west and never returned to Alabama. In 1843, he went into Mexico to search for lost Cherokee who had moved there years before. He died alone on that trip. He left behind a widow, two sons, and a daughter. His wife received a pension from the government in appreciation of Sequoyah’s great contribution.

We might argue that Sequoyah’s syllabary showed even greater genius than Seijong’s alphabet, because Sequoyah knew nothing of reading or writing or linguistics, while Seijong was highly educated and had a deep understanding of linguistics, and he probably had some help. But, in any case, the two of them stand alone in all of history. No other human has ever created a written form of his own language.

At the beginning of this blog is my personal arrangement of the Cherokee Syllabary. The characters are all the same, of course, but this special arrangement is, at least to my way of thinking, more useful than the older, traditional one. To view the image: Right click on the image, then click “View Image.” A larger image will be brought up. To see it full-size, click again. This arrangement of the Syllabary is copyrighted by me.

Notes of interest:

Yonaguska, Chief. (about 1859-1839) In Cherokee, Yonagvsgi, from <Yonah>, bear, and <gvsgi>, drowns him. Yonaguska, known to whites as Drowning Bear, was the adopted father of Col. Will Thomas, later called “the white chief of the Cherokee.”  Mount Yonaguska, in the Great Smokies, is named for him.  The Anglicized pronunciation of his name is YO-na-GUS-ka.

Sequoyah. (about 1760-~August 1843) Out of great respect for his memory, no one has ever commented that his name (Siqua’yi, in Cherokee) can be translated as “Opossum Place” or “Pig Place.” The Cherokee had never seen hogs before the white people came, so they used the word for opossum (si’qua) as a name for them. That left them with the necessity to distinguish ‘possums from pigs, so the ‘possum came to be called “siqua utsetsidi,” the “grinning pig.” Nowadays, only the grin is left, and the possum is just “utsetsidi” [pronounced roughly "oo-chets'-dee," depending on the dialect]. So, Sequoyah’s Cherokee name could be loosely translated as “Possum Hollow” or even “Pig Pen.” However, we had best not make much of these translations. Most writers ignore the matter altogether or say that the name is untranslatable. The giant redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) was named in his honor. [There is some uncertainty about his actual birthdate.]

Chinese language. Except for its ideographic system of writing, Chinese is a vastly simpler language than Cherokee. Chinese does present some difficulties in pronunciation to English speakers, because of its tones. Still, if Chinese were written in an alphabet as suitable to it as the Han’gul is to Korean, it would be relatively easy to learn. For one thing, its grammar is almost non-existent, simpler even than English grammar, and English–believe it or not–has one of the world’s simplest grammars. A verb in Chinese has just one form; thousands of forms of every verb can occur in Cherokee. [Cherokee uses tones, but not so fully as Chinese does. English even uses tones sometimes, in a sense. Does the word "object" change meanings when you say ob-JECT instead of OB-ject?]

Next question, what is an “ideographic system” of writing? Each symbol represents an idea, not a word. Actually, many different languages are spoken in China; yet, a newspaper can be read by any educated person who knows how to use the ideograms, even if he or she has no knowledge of Mandarin Chinese, the principal language of China. We use a few ideograms (= ideographic symbols) in English, too. For example, consider the number 3 [or any other numeral you like]. We read it and think “three,” even though the word is not there. A person from Mexico would read it as “tres” and a person from France would read “trois,” and so on. The ideogram “3″ represents the idea of a collection of three things, no matter what the word is in some specific language.

The “Lost Cherokee”: At several times, groups of Cherokee people moved into Mexico to find a more free existence than was possible in the United States and its territories. Some of them had settled in Texas when it was still a part of Mexico, and the Spanish government had granted land to them. When Texas became a free republic with Sam Houston as its President, Houston–who had been adopted by the Cherokee and who was married to a Cherokee woman–tried very hard and without success to have the Republic recognize the Cherokee land rights. The second President of Texas vowed that he would run all Indians out of Texas. The Cherokee were forced to flee into Mexico; their descendants still live in the area near Lake Chalapa, just south of Guadalajara. However, the “Lost Cherokee” that Sequoyah wanted to find were a semi-legendary band who may have moved west around 1750 or so, before the American Revolution, long before the Trail of Tears and long before Texas became a republic.

Cherokee Place Names, Part 6

Cherokee Place Names, Part 6

Not too far away, near Chechero Road, is Stekoa Creek, which empties directly into the Chattooga River. It takes its name from the Cherokee village of “Sti-ko-yi,” which was built on the banks of the creek. I know of at least two other villages in North Carolina that had the same name; one of them was on the Stekoa Creek that empties into the Little Tennessee River in Graham County, NC. Unfortunately, the original meaning of the name is lost and no Cherokee speaker can remember it or analyze it.

As for Chechero Creek and Road, the name came from the Cherokee town of Chicherohe, which seems to have been somewhere on Warwoman Creek; the village was destroyed during the American Revolutionary War, and all that can be said is that it was probably inhabited by the Lower Cherokee.  The name is pronounced locally as “Church-a-roe” or “Churchy-roe,” accented on the first syllable.  However, this pronunciation, like so many others, is changing as newcomers gradually displace the mountain people.

That name Chechero is one of many that I am still researching. Among others: Waleska, Talona, Chenocetah, Noontootla, and Cartecay. I will be happy to hear from anyone who has any linguistic or more detailed historic information on these names.

Over in Oconee County, South Carolina, on the Chauga River, near Walhalla, is the Chauga Narrows. I have heard that this is a “doozy of a destination” for whitewater rafters, with a drop of 25 feet in a 200-foot run. One source says the name Chauga is “Indian” for “high and lifted up stream.” I doubt that the Cherokee had a name for the river itself; they were more inclined to give names to places along rivers rather than to the rivers themselves. Well, the writer did get the translation partly correct; Chauga is a white man’s rendition of the Cherokee word “Tsogi,” which was probably pronounced “Chawgi” by some of the people. It simply means “upstream.”

Tiger, the town and the mountain south of Clayton, are said to have taken their name from an old Cherokee man who lived there. I cannot confirm that it is so; neither can I deny it. “Tiger” could well be one translation for “tlv-da-tsi”; the more usual translation, however, is “panther.”

Down at Tallulah Falls, the Tallulah River joins the Chattooga River to form the Tugaloo River, eventually reaching the Atlantic Ocean as the Savannah River.

Tallulah is said to mean “the terrible.” It doesn’t, of course. Not even close. Worse yet, though, we don’t know what the original word meant. The name came from a small Cherokee village far up the Tallulah River, its site long since covered by Lake Burton. It is possible, just barely, that the village [“Ta-lu-lu,” with the accent on the last syllable] was given its name for the sounds of a certain kind of frog, or that Tallulah comes from the word “a-ta-lu-lu,” which means something like “unfinished, or incomplete.” A more likely possibility is that the name is from the Creek word Taliwa, which in some dialects, was pronounced almost like Tallulah; “taliwa” is the Muskogean word for “town.” Very likely, the town was taken from the Creeks by the invading Cherokee. The famous Tallulah (water)Falls, wiped out by the dam across the gorge, were known to the Cherokee as “U-gv-yi,” but that meaning is lost and has no meaning known to even the most fluent speaker of Cherokee.

There is a delightful legend about one Chief Grey Eagle–whose rough granite throne was until recently on the campus of Tallulah Falls School–incorporating an ill-fated romance between a white man and a beautiful Cherokee woman, Lover’s Leap, and that sort of thing. I like the story. I have sat many times in Grey Eagle’s chair. I have even looked over Lover’s Leap from the rim of the gorge and I have looked up at it from the depth of the rocky gorge. Unfortunately, the story is just a legend with not a whit of historical truth. But, still, what stories could Grey Eagle’s chair tell us?

Terrora, as we have already seen, is the same word as Tallulah, but from that now-extinct Cherokee dialect which had the r-sound and not the l-sound.

Chattooga River, famous for its rapids and as the site of the filming of Deliverance, takes its name from “Tsa-tu-gi,” an old Cherokee village on the river. Just as we have taken Cherokee place names, they often took whole villages from other tribes and kept the previous name. Most frequently, they pushed Creek Indians out and to the west and south; that appears to be how Tsatugi came to be a Cherokee town. The word has no meaning in Cherokee, and whatever it once meant in Creek has long since been forgotten. Further evidence for this notion can be found in Georgia’s other Chattooga River, the one that empties into the Coosa at Weiss Lake in Alabama; keep in mind that the Cherokee word for a Creek Indian was “Ku-sa,” from which we get Coosa. And, let’s not forget Lake Chatuge, on the Hiwassee River. [The town is spelled Hiawassee, with two a’s, and the river is spelled Hiwassee, with only one a. Both get their names from the Cherokee “a-yu-wa-si,” which means a meadow-like place, or a place with mostly low plants and few trees. The pronunciation of HIGH-uh-WAH-see is reasonably close to the old Cherokee word. More often than not, I hear it pronounced Hi-WAH-see, though, more like the river's name. ] Warwoman Creek empties into the Rabun County Chattooga River near Earl’s Ford.

The Tugaloo River is mostly just Tugaloo Lake now, but, in the days before so many dams, it was obvious that the Tallulah River joined the Chattooga to form the Tugaloo, which, somewhere downstream, picked up enough tributaries to become the Savannah River. The name is pronounced “Too-ga-low” [rhymes with “whoa”] by most of the people who live near Tallulah Falls. I am not at all sure what the old Cherokee name [“Du-gi-lu-yi”] may have meant. One writer suggests it may have something to do with a place at the forks of a stream.

A few more miles downstream from Tallulah is Yonah Lake. “Yo-nah” is the Cherokee word for “bear.” Over near Cleveland, GA, is the conspicuous Yonah Mountain. Looking at it, one would think it by far the highest mountain in White County, but it isn’t even close. I don’t know how it was that white people came to call it Yonah Mountain, either; the old Cherokee name for it was “Ga-da-lu-lu.” No one remembers why or what the name meant, and in the days when anyone did remember, no one wrote it down anywhere, so we are not likely ever to know. There is some evidence that one or more Spaniards lived on or near the mountain, for some time, around 1670, mining gold.

A little west of Hiawassee, we came to the Brasstown Ranger Station. Not far away is Brasstown Creek, and, to the south is Georgia’s highest peak, Brasstown Bald [4784 feet]. No one would suspect that Ellijay and Brasstown have a common Cherokee origin of their names! We’ll need to explain.

You remember that Ellijay is from Cherokee “e-la-i-tse-yi,” the “e-la” part of which means “earth” or “ground,” the “i-tse” means “new” or “green,” and the “-yi” means “place.” One can interpret the word to mean “place of green plants” or “new ground” (a place recently cleared for planting, where new green plants are sprouting). There were several places in the old Cherokee country that bore just the name “I-tse-yi,” roughly equivalent to the English “New Town.”

Now, it happens that the Cherokee word for “brass” is “v-tsai-yi.” [Remember that pronunciation of “v”? And the “-tsai” is roughly “chy” to rhyme with “shy.”] White people mistook Itseyi to be Vtsaiyi, and they do sound a bit alike. So, anyway, several villages named “Itseyi” came to be translated as “Brasstown.”

Gumlog Creek empties into Brasstown Creek. Not too far away are Gumlog Mountain and the Gumlog Community. Gumlog is a not very good translation of the name of the little Cherokee settlement that used to be on the creek. The village was called “Tsi-la-lu-hi,” from the word “tsi-la-lu,” sweetgum tree, and the “-hi” was the “locative” [= “place where”] we have seen before in the form “-yi.” Then, Tsilaluhi, the Cherokee town, really meant “sweetgum place” or “sweetgum town.” Well, by gum, at least they got the “Gum” right!

Over to the west of Brasstown Creek is Track Rock Gap. The trail there used to have a kind of soft soapstone rocks [greenstone] on both sides of it, and all sorts of scratchings and carvings had been made by Indians passing that way, resting en route. I do not know how many of them still exist, for I have not been there since childhood. I hope the State has made some effort to preserve them. Despite some fanciful interpretations by archaeologists, they were probably just ancient graffiti. There is an interesting story of one outline of a large foot, more than 17 inches long, complete with six toes. Perhaps a Bigfoot? The Cherokee name for the place was “Da-tsu-na-lo-sgv-yi,” “ a place where there are tracks.”

Just west of Blairsville is the Nottely River and Nottely Lake. The river continues on northward and empties into the Hiwassee a short distance west of Murphy, NC. Long ago, the small Cherokee settlement of “Na-du-tli”  [sometimes written Natuhli] lay on the river bank just inside what is now Cherokee County, NC. The village was another of those taken from the Creeks by the Cherokee, and the name seems to have been another forgotten Creek word; once again, the Cherokee just kept the name after driving the Creeks out. From this village came the river’s name. Contrary to some publications, Natuhli did not mean “daring horseman.” [The Cherokee “tl-“ sound is something like an English sound “hl-“; it is even more like the correctly pronounced “Ll” in Welsh “Llewellyn.”]

South of Blairsville, just north of Neel’s Gap, there is a Nottely Falls on Shanty Creek. Just downstream from the falls, Frogtown Creek [which I have mentioned earlier] empties into Shanty Creek.

Along or near the Nottely River is the present Notalee Community, which, I assume, takes its name from the river.

Just east of the river, toward the southern part of Union County [GA], is the Choestoe Community. Its name came from the Cherokee “Tsi-stu-yi” (from “tsi-stu,” rabbit, with the locative “-yi,” together meaning “Rabbit Place” or “Rabbit Town.” The same word appears in South Carolina as Choastea Creek, and in Tennessee, near Benton, as Chestuee Creek. In Cherokee mythology, Rabbit was a wily trickster, like Coyote was to the Western Indians. In fact, most of the Br’er Rabbit stories originated in Cherokee myths. [Does anyone remember that especially pleasant movie, Song of the South, with its Br’er Rabbit stories? Apparently, Disney thinks it politically incorrect to release it or allow it to be sold on videocassettes. It does not seem to me that anything in the film is demeaning to anyone, but I suppose that not everyone agrees with me.]

Cherokee Place Names, Part 5

Cherokee Place Names, Part 5

Last summer, my wife and I drove back from Dillard, Georgia, where we had spent a couple of pleasant days. We came via Clayton and Highway 76, a delightful drive through these beautiful mountains of ours. On this route, the place names bring back the spirits of the old Cherokee people. Let’s look at a few of the places that lie along or near the way from Dillard back to Blue Ridge.

After reading some of my previous articles, a good friend of mine–whose intelligence I respect–asked me how in the world can one Cherokee word [itsa´ti] be the source of place names so different as Sautee and New Echota?

Well, different people hear foreign sounds often quite differently, and their attempted pronunciations sometimes do not even seem to be the same words. And, there were at least three (and probably four) different major Cherokee dialects with some varying pronunciations. Even the speakers of the same dialect had their own peculiarities of saying names. Time also alters English attempts at speaking and spelling old Cherokee place names.

Consider my own town’s name. “E-la-i-tse-yi” became Ellijay here (and also at Franklin, NC); it became Ellejoy up in Tennessee, and, down in Hall County, it is now Elachee. [The ts- in Cherokee is most often pronounced like a ch- or a j-; sometimes, it has the sound of z-, and there are other times when it just has the plain old ts- sound as in “fatso.”] And, don’t forget that we often mangle the pronunciation of everyday English words. When enough people mispronounce a word long enough, it eventually becomes the correct pronunciation. In a real sense, ignorance is what causes every language to change and evolve. That is why the Roman Latin of Caesar gradually changed into Italian (and Spanish, and Portuguese, and French, and Romanian, and a dozen other dialects, depending upon where the Latin was being used).

Right now, English is in a massive state of change. Most people, including a lot of English teachers and professors, haven’t noticed how much it’s changing yet. A hundred years from now, the way we speak and write now will seem really old-fashioned and probably very difficult to understand. Think for a minute of how the actors sounded in the oldest “talkie” movie you ever saw; it wasn’t just the overacting-it was their speech itself. Or, think of how your oldest grandparents used to speak. Do you speak the same way?

A little more about the Cherokee language needs to be repeated here, because not everyone has read (or remembered) the previous articles.

To English speakers, Cherokee is a very difficult language. Its grammar is so very different from English as to seem impossibly complex. It represents a totally different way of thinking. It has sounds that don’t exist in English, and it completely lacks the sounds we represent by the letters, b, p, v, and f. [These are called “labial” sounds, because the lips are used to make them. Try it: Notice that both your lips touch when you make the sounds of b and p, and you can feel that your lower lip touches your upper teeth when you make the sounds of v and f.] All the dialects of Cherokee now remaining don’t have an “r” sound, either; the “l” sound is used instead. (One extinct dialect did have the r sound; that explains why Tallulah and Terrora both came from the same Cherokee word.)

Lacking those sounds that we use in English without even having to think, old Cherokee speakers made “Polly” into “Qualla” and “Betty” into “Quedi.” The word for a housecat, an animal previously unknown to Indians, became “wesa,” adapted from the now old-fashioned English word “puss.” When Spanish explorers brought the first cows they ever saw, the Cherokee took the Spanish word “vaca” and pronounced it “waga”; that remains today the word for cow. “Asquani” became the Cherokee word for “Spanish”; it is still the word used for a Hispanic person. “Mary” became “Meli,” “Caroline” became “Kalalina,” and so on.

Cherokee vowel sounds are a lot like Spanish vowels; sometimes they are a bit more nasal or a little shorter or longer. There is one extra vowel sound that is very rare in English: it is the nasalized [“through the nose”] version of the u sound in but. Seeing that Cherokee words have no v sound, we use the letter <v> to represent that nasal u sound when writing Cherokee words in English letters. For example, “v-v” is one Cherokee word for “yes”; it is pronounced almost exactly the way we here in the mountains say “UH-huh” when we mean “yes,” too! Do you notice that “through the nose” sound it has?

Near the far northeastern corner of Rabun County lies the town of Satolah. It gets its name from the Cherokee “su-da’-li,” which means “six.” [I hyphenate between syllables in Cherokee words, so that they may be a little easier to read. Also, we need to say that the Cherokee sound of d is somewhere between the English t sound and d sound.] Down near Canton, Georgia, in Cherokee County, is a prominent Sixes Road, probably a translation of the same word; there is also a Satula Community in Cherokee County. That the two of these places are in the same vicinity would seem to indicate that they are both derived from “su-da’-li.” There is also a Satula Avenue in Athens, Georgia; Satula Mountain and Satula Falls are near Highlands, North Carolina. But, without some very careful research–which I have not yet done on any of these names except Satolah–one must be very careful about such speculations. I know a person of Polish ancestry whose last name is Satula, and the word means “saddle” in Finnish. And, “Satilla” occurs in Wayne County; I recall driving across a Satilla Creek down there; that place name is highly unlikely to be of Cherokee origin.

Now, why would anyone choose the word “six” for a place name? Well, on the rolls of the Cherokee Nation in 1835 were men named “Six Killer” (and Sixkiller is still a name easily found among the Oklahoma Cherokee), “Three Killer,” and “Four Killer.” These names were most likely taken because of some repeated successes in battles against the Catawbas or the Creeks. So, Satolah is very probably a shortened form of “Su-da’-li-di-hi,” Six Killer. I think the same may be said for Sixes Road, too. On a more mysterious level, medicine men sometimes referred to the moon, in ceremonies and rituals, as Sudalidihi; no one has any idea why. The source may have been some long-forgotten legend, bearing in mind that the moon was masculine–and possibly a warrior–in Cherokee mythology. [See Nantahala, in Part 10.]

Moving from Satolah toward Clayton, we find Warwoman Creek and Warwoman Dell. There have been some wild legends about Cherokee Amazons, and, no doubt there were occasional instances of women who acted as warriors. However, that is not the meaning behind Warwoman Dell and Creek.

In the times before contact with white people so disrupted Cherokee ways, it was the women of the tribe who decided most questions of war and peace, and they alone determined the fate of captives. It was also these same mature women who sat in council to choose the War Chief [the “Red Chief,” for red was the color of war, just as white was the color of peace]. The leader of the women’s council was called the “War Woman” by some of the early white writers. The Cherokee actually called her “Tsi-ge-yu,” which is often translated as “The Pretty Woman.” The real translation is “I love her,” so the tribe’s most important woman was most often called “The Beloved Woman” in English. The Beloved Woman also decided the punishment that should be given to major offenders within the tribe; she could and did make life or death decisions. About the time of the American Revolution and continuing into the 19th Century, Nancy Ward was the Beloved Woman. I believe that some descendants of hers still live in the Georgia mountains.

One tributary of Warwoman Creek is Tuckaluge Creek, named for one of the several Cherokee villages called “Ti-qua-li-tsi.” One stood somewhere on Tuckaluge Creek, but the most important one of these towns lay about where Bryson City, NC, now stands. The meaning of the name is long forgotten, and I cannot analyze it. In Blount County, TN, the same word occurs as Tuckalechee.

We’ll continue from here in our next section.

Cherokee Place Names, Part 4

Cherokee Place Names, Part 4

A year or so ago, my wife and I drove along the Ocoee River, just across the Georgia line in Tennessee. We were surprised to see how low the water was up there, remembering the attention the Ocoee River rapids got during the 1996 Olympic Games. Here, in late November, we found only bare rocks where we expected churning waters.

The name Ocoee comes from the Cherokee “U-wa-go-hi,” which translates to “apricot place.” Now, let’s be sure we are not talking about the peach-like fruit that grows on trees and, in dried form, often gets incorporated into trail snack mixes. For most of us who grew up in these mountains of Georgia and Tennessee and North Carolina, an “old field apricot” is what the botanists call Passiflora incarnata, the native wild passion flower vine that grows in abandoned fields and along the roadsides. After its lemon-sized fruit begins to yellow and wrinkle just a bit, the thin skin is easily opened so that the delicious fruit can be eaten on the spot or made into a drink, in old Indian style. The leaves and other parts can be made into an effective sedative tea, too. Its Cherokee name is “u-wa-ga,” and some people call it a “Maypop” in English.

The Ocoee River got its name from an old and important Cherokee town on the river, in a place where the wild apricots grew abundantly, near the river’s junction with the Hiwassee, not too far from Benton, Tennessee. It is not at all clear why the same river is called the Toccoa River in Georgia and the Ocoee in Tennessee, but I suspect some Georgia people simply got the names confused; they seem to have heard “Ocoee” as “Toccoa” and no one ever got around to correcting the error.  [Ocoee is pronounced "oh-KOH-ee."]

I’ve noticed that the apricot vines are getting scarce these days–fields don’t get abandoned; they turn into subdivisions. And, the roadside plants get mowed away before the fruits mature. I have planted some on my own property; given a chance, they grow well.

Ocoee does not mean “people of the river,” which appears in some publications.

Ducktown, Tennessee, a few miles to the east of the Ocoee, lies in the same area as the old town of Gawonvyi [Kawonunyi or Kawanunyi], and “Duck Town” is a pretty good translation of the Cherokee name. “Kawona” is the word for duck, and we see the locative –yi again.

Not far from where the Doublehead Gap Road crosses the Toccoa River in Fannin County, Skeenah Creek empties into the river. Nearby was the Cherokee settlement of Asginayi ["ghost place"], which appears in some old papers as Skeinah. The creek rises somewhere near Skeenah Gap on the Union County line. I have found the name Skeenah in South Carolina and North Carolina, too. Its pronunciation is very close to the old Cherokee word, missing only a light “ah” sound at the beginning of the word. Cherokee “a-sgi-na” meant roughly the same things as the English words “ghost,” “demon,” or “devil.” Skeenah Gap Road makes its way through some very pretty countryside, well worth the drive from Blue Ridge or Ellijay or Morganton. [There is also Asgini Branch, a small stream in northern Swain County, North Carolina, whose name could be translated "Ghost Creek."]

The Cherokee word for one’s head or skull, so long as it remains attached to the body, is “a-sgo-li.” A more ghostly severed head is “u-sga,” the plural form of which is “tsu-sga.” (The ts- part is usually pronounced somewhere between a j- and a ch- sound, but some people make it sound like a z.)

Now, if an Indian man were called “Ta-li-tsu-sga,” “two heads,” it did not mean he was a freak of nature; rather, the name might have been given because he had collected or owned two severed heads, presumably of his enemies. Anyway, there was a Cherokee chief Talitsusga who lived just about two hundred years ago. The English translation of his name, as in Doublehead Gap, really does sound better than “Two Heads,” doesn’t it? We don’t know much about him, except that he may have once defeated the Creeks over in Alabama.

Since we are mentioning “heads,” we can notice that “Brown Head” (Wo-di-ge a-sgo-li) is the Cherokee name for the copperhead snake.

A few miles north of Blue Ridge, Georgia, Fightingtown Creek arises and snakes its way through the woods to the Ocoee River just above McCaysville. The creek’s English name came from an incomplete translation of the name of a Cherokee town near its banks. Let’s trace it, with some meanderings.

The word “wa-lo-si” (usually pronounced “wa-lawsh”) meant “frog.” Not a bullfrog or a toad, but quite specifically the green frog that my herpetologist friends would call Rana clamitans melanota.

In our North Georgia mountains grows a little plant of the lily family known commonly as the yellow mandarin; botanists call it Disporum lanuginosum, and it reminds one of a very downy Solomon’s seal. I think its red berries are likely to be poisonous. There is an ancient Cherokee story about a couple of green frogs who got into a fight using the flimsy stalks of the plant as weapons, so the old-time Cherokee called the plant “wa-lo-si u-nu-li-sdi” which means “frogs use it to fight with.” Near a big patch of these plants was the Indian town “Wa-lo-si-u-ni-li-sdi-yi” (“Place where the frogs-fight-with-it plants grow”). The name of the town, as often happened, became the name of the creek, but, untranslated, it proved too much of a mouthful for English speakers. To keep things simple, they just translated it as Fightingtown, choosing to ignore most of the story. And that was that.

But, the same frog appears again in the name of another old Cherokee town, “Wa-lo-si-yi,” “Frog Place,” which became Frogtown in English. There’s a beautiful little Frogtown Valley up near Neels Gap, and not too far to the south, down in Lumpkin County [GA], Frogtown Creek flows into the Chestatee River.

Another plant was known to the Cherokee as “ga-tv-la-ti.” It was a rather important plant, with fibers finer and stronger than flax, which could be spun and woven into cloth or carrying bags or fishing lines and more. Textiles made of it have been found in 3000-year-old mounds in Ohio and elsewhere. It had many medicinal uses, including as a contraceptive that may have actually worked and–after the white man brought the disease among them–a reputed cure for syphilis. To treat the latter, one chewed the fresh roots and swallowed only the juice. Now we know, too, that the plant does indeed have some potent effects on the heart and circulatory system. Botanists call it Apocynum cannabinum.

The Europeans had long used hemp fibers for cordage and textiles. Yes, that’s hemp, Cannabis; it was much later that it became a “smoke.” Recently there has been a great increase in the legal use of hemp fibers for cloth, and one can buy sweaters and such made thereof. Similar fibers are linen (from flax) and ramie from southeastern Asia.

The white pioneers began to use the gatvlati plant, too; they learned about it from the Indians, so they called it “Indian hemp.” There was an Indian town on the creek not too far from where Morganton now stands. To the Cherokee, it was “Ga-tv-la-ti-yi,” “wild hemp place.” The white people translated it as Hemptown, and so we have Hemptown Creek and several other places that incorporate the word Hemp, for Indian hemp; that includes Hemp Top, a mountain rising to about 3550 feet some miles north of Hemptown Creek.

Let’s end this segment with a few less involved explanations:

COHUTTA: From Cherokee “ga-hu-ti,” a shortened form of “ga-hu-ti-yi,” “a shed roof supported on poles.” The mountain was thought by some to resemble such a structure. And, no, it does not mean “mother mountain.”

HIAWASSEE: It’s Hiawassee for the town, but it’s spelled Hiwassee for the river and the ridge south of Brasstown Bald. From “a-yu-wa-si,” “a meadow or grassy place.” (We’ll mention the linguistic story of Brasstown later; as we are seeing, many place names that are seemingly straightforward English have a Cherokee ancestry, too.)

YAHOOLA CREEK: near Dahlonega. I am convinced that it comes ultimately from the Cherokee “ya-hu-la” (or “ya-hu-li”), a kind of hickory tree; however, the creek takes its name specifically from the legend of a Cherokee trader bearing the name Yahula, who was taken away by the spirit people. The same Cherokee word also means “doodlebug,” the larva which digs those little conical craters in dusty soil, trapping and then devouring ants and other hapless small critters. The adult form of the ant lion, as it is commonly known, looks like a dragonfly. Some people have suggested that Yahoola may come from the Creek “yo-ho-lo,” the black emetic tea made from yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria); that plant is itself an interesting story, but I doubt that it gave its name, even indirectly, to Yahoola Creek. The creek joins the Chestatee River just south of Dahlonega.

CHESTATEE: From “a-tsv-sta-ti-yi,” “firelight place.” A former method of hunting deer at night involved setting fires and driving the animals into the river, where they might be more easily killed by arrows or spears. Somehow, this method just does not jibe with my own upbringing; taking a deer was a much more personal and respectful thing where I grew up.

 

The Tower on Chenocetah Mountain

In 1954, I lived a hundred yards or so from this tower. Years before, I had picked huckleberries all over the then undesecrated mountain. Now, the mountain has been “developed,” and there are expensive houses covering it.

The latitude and longitude of the Tower, in decimal degrees: 34.502077, -83.506691.

From these, you will be able to find it precisely on Google Earth or other maps.

–Chenocetah

Cherokee Place Names, Part 3

Cherokee Place Names, Part 3

The meanings of some of the old Cherokee place names were long since lost to the Cherokee themselves when the white people came. Perhaps a few bear traces of the languages of the people who preceded the Cherokee, for the Cherokee arrived in the Southeast about 3000 to 3500 years ago [at about the same time Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt]. Others names were taken by the Cherokee from neighboring tribes such as the Creeks and Catawbas. In our area are quite a few place names that are very likely to be Cherokee or Cherokee-influenced, but which I have not been able to pin down with certainty, seeing that I like to do much more than just guess or speculate. For examples, consider these names: Waleska, Cartecay, Noontootla, Talona, and even Chenocetah. Perhaps someone who reads this article will have more historical information on these names than I do and will be good enough to pass it on to me.

Along the way, we need to correct some false translations, too. The colorful “translations” often given by localities of their names’ origins are sometimes grossly incorrect. Some samples:

TOCCOA: We have both the Toccoa River and the city of Toccoa in our area. And, there is Toccoa Falls. While none of us will deny that these places are beautiful, the Cherokee word from which the name is taken decidedly does not mean “beautiful.” [The word for "beautiful" is "uwoduhi."] Among the most lasting enemies of the Cherokee were the Catawba Indians. When the white men came, the Catawba lived in the region about what is now Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Cherokee word for Catawba was “A-ta-qua,” often shortened to “Ta-qua.” Sometimes, Catawba war parties invaded the Cherokee territory, maybe even sometimes trying to set up a Catawba village in the area. The Cherokee did not take kindly to such incursions, and they probably wiped the invaders out completely. Some of the places where memories of finding Catawbas remained were called “Catawba place,” which came out as “Ta-qua-hi” in Cherokee. [The -hi ending has the same meaning as the -yi we have seen before; we can translate it as "place where."] So, Toccoa really means “Catawba place.”

To get some idea of how inimical the Cherokee and Catawba were toward one another, at the turn of the last century, there was at least one older man on the North Carolina Cherokee reservation who bore the name of “Ta-qua-di-hi.” which means “Catawba Killer.”

A few miles north of Toccoa, on the Tugalo River, is Yonah Lake.  The river forms a part of the border between Georgia and South Carolina.  Yonah, as will be mentioned elsewhere, is from the Cherokee word for “bear.”

TOCO is not from the same root as Toccoa, as we will see later.

NACOOCHEE: It is usually said to mean “Evening Star.” That mistake came about because someone who knew a little Cherokee thought it was the same word as “na-qui-si,” which does mean “star.” Actually, the name comes from the old Cherokee town of “Na-gu-tsi,” which was located in Nacoochee Valley, at the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River. The name of the town has no meaning in Cherokee and was taken by them [probably along with the village itself] from earlier Indians living in the area, hapless people who were pushed further south by the Cherokee. Those Indians may have been the Yuchi, also called the Uchee. We notice that the last two syllables in Nacoochee would agree with that, but there is no way to verify this speculation.

By the way, Chattahoochee is not from Cherokee; it is from a Creek Indian word that meant something like “painted rocks.” It is interesting, but probably not significant, that it ends with the same syllables as Nacoochee.

The “Legend of Sautee and Nacoochee” no doubt makes an interesting story for tourists, but it is totally an invention of white people. SAUTEE comes from the Cherokee “I-tsa-ti”; it was the name of several important Cherokee towns, including a special “peace town” on the Soque River not far from Nacoochee Valley, and also of the large Nacoochee mound. “Echota” and “Sautee” are the same name, just rendered differently in English ears.

TALLULAH: It is said to mean “the terrible.” The name may have come from a word meaning “incomplete” or “unfinished”; we will likely never know for sure, but it definitely does not mean “terrible” nor “there lies your child” [as one writer stated long ago]. The Cherokee tended to avoid the Gorge and the great and beautiful falls that were destroyed by the dam built early in the last century; they called the falls “U-gv-yi,” but no one remembers what that meant. In the 1890’s and until the dam wiped out the falls, Tallulah Falls was a very popular and somewhat posh resort area, with several first-class hotels and access by train from Atlanta. I have heard that Senator Bankhead, a Democrat from Alabama, was so impressed by the place that he named his daughter for it; Tallulah Bankhead [1902-1968] became a famous film actress. A little more on Tallulah will come later.

TERRORA is the same word as Tallulah, but in the old and now extinct Lower Dialect of Cherokee, which had the “r” sound instead of the “l” sound. [Modern Cherokee dialects do not have an "r" sound.]

Now, let’s look at a few more names before we run out of space for this section.

COOSAWATTEE: In Ellijay, the Ellijay and Cartecay Rivers flow together to form the Coosawattee River. Its name comes from a couple of Cherokee words: “Gu-sa u-we-ti-yi,” which we can break down into “Gu-sa,” the Cherokee name for the Creek Indians, and “u-we-ti-yi.” This last part comes from “u-we-ti,” [old or ancient] and the now familiar locative -yi. Putting it all together, we can see that Coosawattee means “old Creek Indian place.” The Cherokee had earlier taken that area from the Creeks.

By the way, Oklahoma Cherokee still call North Carolina “Tsa-la-gu-we-ti-yi,’ which means “the old Cherokee place.”

In the movie Deliverance, the “Cahulawassee River” is likely a disguised reference to the Coosawattee River, which underwent development after the Army Engineers approved the building of a dam in 1959.  Today, the result is Coosawattee River Resort near Ellijay and Carter’s Lake; the former dramatic rapids are no more.

We have to notice that the Cherokee “G” sound is almost the same as the English “K” sound; that will explain the meaning of COOSA ["Gu-sa"], as in the river and the town near Rome and in Coosa Bald, south of Blairsville. It simply means “Creek Indian.”

Over near New Echota, the Coosawattee and the Conasauga come together to form the Oostanaula River.

CONASAUGA: There were several settlements and villages in the old Cherokee lands which bore the name “Ga-na-so-gi.” No one remembers what it meant originally and there is no Cherokee translation; maybe it was just a Cherokee adaptation of an earlier Indian place name, the remnant of some long lost and forgotten tribe. An area of northwestern Gilmer County, Georgia, was the site of one such village; the name appeared on maps as “Connesauga” until 1915.  One English mangling of the name is “Kennesaw.” 

OOSTANAULA: Several old Cherokee towns also bore the name “U-sta-na-lo-hi.” The translation is “a place where there is a natural barrier or dam of rocks across a stream.” The local pronunciation is “OO-stuh-NOLLY.” The plural form is “U-ni-sta-na-li,” from which we get the name EASTANOLLEE.

Well, as long as we are on this river run, we can point out that the Coosa River is formed by the confluence of the Oostanaula and Etowah Rivers, over at Rome. So, let’s close out this segment with the Etowah.

ETOWAH: There was a Cherokee town called “I-ta-wa.” Once again, no one has any idea of what the original meaning was, and it probably wasn’t Cherokee. Down in Forsyth County, southeast of Ball Ground, is Hightower, and that “Hightower” is probably the same Cherokee word. In Towns County [GA], near the North Carolina line, there is Hightower Bald and Hightower Gap; not very far away is Hightower Creek.

And, then there is Ball Ground . . . We will just let that be a story for another day.

Cherokee Place Names, Part 2

Cherokee Place Names, Part 2

Sometimes, there are all sorts of interesting historical connections among place names. and most of us have forgotten or never knew about those connections. Let’s consider Ellijay, Turniptown, and Whitepath, all in Gilmer County [GA], as one example.

Whitepath was a member of the tribal council which met regularly in the big townhouse at the Cherokee town of Ellijay. He himself lived in a smaller settlement that the white people called Turniptown, on what is now Turniptown Creek. At the council meetings, he spoke out strongly against the Christianity and white man’s ways that the Cherokee were embracing more and more. He was especially concerned with the Cherokee constitution that had been written based on suggestions to the Cherokee from Thomas Jefferson, and he wanted to go back to the old tribal laws and ways of living. By 1828, he had gathered a group of followers and might have started a serious rebellion, but the old ways were too far gone and his supporters faded out. Whitepath was removed from the council for a while, but, later, he gave in and was given back his council seat. He died on the Trail of Tears in 1838.

Now, let’s take a look at the Cherokee words that were translated as Whitepath and as Turniptown.

Whitepath’s Cherokee name was “Nv-no tsu-ne-ga.” The “Nv-no” means “trails” or “paths.” (Don’t forget that we are using the letter “V” for the Cherokee sound “uh” as in English “Uh-huh.”)The “tsu-ne-ga” is the plural form of the word “u-ne-ga,” which means “white.” But, there is more meaning to the name than just “white paths.” To the old Cherokee, the color white was a symbol of peacefulness and happiness and more. After the very important Green Corn Dance–more on that later–the people talked about eating white food and walking on white paths back to their white houses. By all of that, they meant great contentment and happiness and good things. In fact, if a Cherokee man said “I am a white man,” he did not mean that he had suddenly become a white guy! Instead, he meant that he is surrounded by happiness. So, one pretty good translation of Whitepath’s Cherokee name would be “Happy Trails”!

Well, let’s see. So long as we are talking about “white,” the word for “White Man” is “Yo-ne-ga.” From that word, possibly, comes the place name Unaka, in North Carolina, and maybe even Unicoi, but we will take a closer look at those names later. (If he wanted to say “I am a white person,” a Cherokee would have said “Tsi-yo-ne-ga.”) Yonega is also the Cherokee word for the English language.

But, we had better get back to Turniptown and finish the path we started! I live within a mile of Turniptown Road, and only a little further than that from Big Turniptown Creek. Little Turniptown Creek joins the Big one over on the north side of Highway 515 and shortly the resulting bigger creek empties into the Ellijay River. The Indian name for the Turniptown village was “U-lv-yi,” from the word “U-li” and that “-yi” that means “place.” [You remember that I called the -yi a "locative."] The word “U-li” was translated by whites as “turnip,” but it was not a turnip at all. It was instead the name of a kind of plant that grew in the bottom lands along the creeks. The plant itself is actually a kind of wild bean. What makes the plant so special is that it has underground tubers, sometimes lots of them, almost like a string of dark brown beads the size and shape of eggs, and these tubers are very fine eating. They were an important food item; apparently the Cherokee never really got around to cultivating them, but they would plant some near settlements to get them started growing wild if they were not already found there. The name for the tubers themselves was “nu-na.” Later on, when they began to grow potatoes, the word “nu-na” came to be used for what many of us up in these mountains call “Irish potatoes,” and people began to forget about the wild bean that those of us who grew up eating them called “pig potatoes” when we spoke of them in English.

Just for the record, that wild bean that grows mostly in rich bottom land has the scientific name Apios americana. Scientists at Purdue University and elsewhere are busy developing varieties that can be cultivated and marketed. Personally, I like the tubers raw; when one peels away the outer brown layer, there is a solid white interior, just a little more mealy than regular potatoes. Boiled, the pig potatoes taste like a cross between boiled peanuts and potatoes; they make good chips, too, and they have about three times as much protein as potatoes. [The so-called "Irish potatoes" were actually a gift of the South American Indians to the world; the Irish people became so dependent upon them that the population of Ireland grew larger than it probably should have at the time. When there was a terrible potato blight in the 1840's, the results were disastrous.]

So much for that. We rambled a bit, but with a little purpose. Before we end this segment, we can take a quick look at a few more place names that won’t get us so carried away.

DAHLONEGA: The Cherokee word was “da-la-ni-ge-i,” which means “yellow” or “yellow place.” Yellow, of course, is the color of gold, and gold was discovered in Georgia about 1815. The story goes that an Indian child found a nugget on the Chestatee River banks and brought it to his mother. She sold it to a white man, and the gold rush was on.

AMICALOLA: From the Cherokee words “a-ma u-qua-le-lv-yi.” (There is that locative -yi again!) The “a-ma” means “water.” The other part means something like “place where it makes a rolling sound [like thunder].”As we can see, the original pronunciation got botched up quite a bit in this one when it was taken over into English. Still, a “place where water makes a rolling thunder” is not a bad name for a major waterfall.  The name was spelled “Amicolola” until 1899, and it had been “Armacolola” until about 1865.  The pronunciation of Amicalola is “AMMI-ka-LOW-la.”  A good photo of the falls can be found at dawnmorningstar.wordpress.com.

Cherokee Place Names, Part 1

Cherokee Place Names in the Southeastern U.S.

We here in the mountains of North Georgia live in what used to be Cherokee Indian territory. At the time of the Removal, just 168 years ago, the Cherokee Nation’s territory was shaped roughly like a pig’s eye, with one corner near Guntersville, Alabama, and the other at Bryson City, North Carolina. Ellijay [the one in Georgia; there are others, too] was near the eye’s center, and the lands ran from just north of Marietta and Lawrenceville and Gainesville all the way to the Tennessee River in the middle of eastern Tennessee.

When the white men first came, the Cherokee lands extended as far north as what are now Cincinnati, Ohio, and Charleston, West Virginia, and they included most of Kentucky and Tennessee, all of western North Carolina, over half of South Carolina, all the way to Orangeburg, and big chunks of what later became Virginia and West Virginia. All of North Georgia was included; in fact, Interstate Highway 20 is fairly close to the ancient southern boundary of the Cherokee lands, all the way across the state. A big slice of northern Alabama was also in the Cherokee territory, and it was often fought over with the Creek Indians. [It really did not occur to Indians that they "owned" their lands; they just occupied and used them and kept unwanted intruders from moving in.]

So, we are not at all surprised [and most of us already know] that a lot of our place names came from the Cherokee language. We tend to take these names for granted, but, to European visitors, they are often unpronounceable and very puzzling. Most Americans have little or no idea what the place names originally meant. And, there have arisen all sorts of false “translations” and colorful and romantic “Indian legends” about some of the names. The great majority of those stories are just not true, sadly.

In our mountains, one can’t help feeling the spirit of the old Cherokee Nation in the place names that would seem so exotic to an Englishman, names that are so natural a part of our world here that we give them little thought. Perhaps these articles will give you a glimpse of the ghosts of those who lived here long before the white people ever came. Try to imagine the land as it was only two or three hundred years ago, and then think of the thousands of years that came before that. In all that time, all around where you now sit or park or work or live, Indian people were going about the everyday tasks of living: growing corn and beans, hunting, raising families, loving, telling stories, playing ballgames, sometimes fighting. What stories these mountain places could tell! We can barely touch the surface here, but let us try.

We will take a look at some of the place names around us that come from Cherokee, and we will tell the true story behind each one of them. We have to keep in mind that Cherokee is a very, very difficult language for English-speaking people, so it is not at all surprising that the names pretty often got badly garbled in pronunciation.

Some quick comments on Cherokee: It has no F, B, V, or P sounds; if a place name has those sounds, it probably did not come from Cherokee. Modern Cherokee has no R sound, either, but one old Cherokee dialect did, so now and then we will find a place name with the R sound. And, Cherokee has one sound that there is no letter in English to represent; because V is not otherwise used, we will use that letter for the sound. About the only time the sound is used in English is when you sort of grunt “Uh-huh” to mean “yes.” So, in giving Cherokee sounds, when I write “v,” you can think of the pronunciation as being like the first syllable of “Uh-huh.” By the way, “V” in Cherokee means “Yes”; it is a sort of nasalized sound.

SALACOA: It comes from “Sa-li-quo-yi,” which means “bear grass place.” Salacoa Creek rises in Pickens County and makes its way through two other counties before emptying into the Coosawattee River in Gordon County, Georgia. On that creek, probably near its head, there used to be an old Cherokee village for which the creek took its name. Probably the Indians who settled the village were impressed by some large stand of bear grass that grew in the immediate area. In Cherokee, the ending “-yi” on many words was what we call a locative; that is just a smart-alecky way of saying it means “place.” The same word that is used for bear grass in Cherokee is also used for the green tree snake, maybe because it looks vaguely like a piece of the bear grass. In Oklahoma Cherokee, the word has become “se-la-quo-ya,” and it refers only to the green snake.

TALKING ROCK: It’s a translation of the old Cherokee name “Nv-ya Gv-wo-ni-sgi,” which literally means “rock that talks habitually.” Somewhere on Talking Rock Creek, there was an echo rock that attracted the attention of the Indians. I think it was probably downstream a little from the town of Talking Rock. When I get a chance, I want to go down there and look around, to see if I can find the rock. Maybe some of the white settlers understood only a little Cherokee; some of them thought Nv-ya Gv-wo-ni-sgi meant something like “council rock,” a place where the Indians got together to talk at council meetings, but this is not true. The words mean “rock that talks” and not “rock where they talk.”

ELLIJAY: From “E-la i-tse-yi.” The meaning is “green ground place” or “green earth place.” But, that may be subject to more than one interpretation. The “e-la” part is straightforward enough; it means “ground” or “soil” or “earth.” “I-tse-yi” is pronounced in Cherokee about like the sounds you make if you just say the letters E-J-E; it often means “green” in the sense of unripe, and it also means “new.” So, Ellijay may also mean “new ground place,” that is, as at least old-timers will know, a place that has been cleared of trees and made ready for use as a plowed field. The same name was given to many different Cherokee villages, one of which happened to be about where Ellijay, Georgia, is now located. There was another in South Carolina, at the head of the Keowee River; and, another was near what is now Franklin, North Carolina, on Ellijay Creek there. Still another was known to be on what is now called Ellejoy Creek, which feeds into Little River, near Maryville, Tennessee. Another version of the Cherokee words that became “Ellijay” is found down in Hall County: Elachee, as in The Elachee Nature Science Center. From these examples, you will be able to see how names get changed around because people did not really know how to pronounce them correctly.

I have noticed that readers are often seeking the modern pronunciation of the town of Ellijay.  It is accented on the first and last syllables [EL-li-JAY, or more frequently locally, ELL-uh-JAY].