Extracts From:
SOUTH CAROLINA, A Short History 1520-1948
By David Duncan Wallace
University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1961
CHAPTER 11, THE INDIANS OF SOUTH CAROLINA, pp 9-10

The Cherokees, Iroquoian Stock.-

This brings us to the Cherokees, the most important of all the Indians of the
southeastern portion of the United States. The Cherokee nation, says C. C.
Royce, has probably occupied a more prominent place in the history of this
country than any other except possibly their warlike kinsmen the Iroquois, or
Six Nations, of New York. They are one of the few Indian peoples, according to
J. W. Powell, who have been able to pass through the ordeal of more than two
centuries of wars, councils, and litigation with the white man into present
prosperity.

The Cherokees were a mountain people when De Soto found them in 1540 near where
the Eastern Band still dwell among the Great Smokies. Their language indicates
that they had long been separated from other Iroquoians. The lands which they
claimed were bounded thus: leaving a point on the Santee River near Eutawville
in the southeastern part of Orangeburg County, go west to the junction of the
North and South Edisto; up the South Edisto to its source and westward to the
line dividing Alabamna and Mississippi thirty miles south of Tennessee; thence
north to and along the Tennessee River to the point at which it receives the
Duck River halfway across the State of Tennessee; thence to the Ohio along the
watershed that divides the Tennessee and the Cumberland up the Ohio to the Great
Kanawha; up the Great Kanawha and the New River to Chiswell's Mine on the
northern slope of the Iron Mountains: thence east along the Iron Mountains
thirty-five miles to the Blue Ridge just southeast of Floyd, Virginia; southwest
along the crest of the Blue Ridge to the source of Linnville River, North
Carolina, and down that stream, the Catawba, and the Santee to the point from
which we started.

The Cherokees, though claiming this great empire, were essentially a mountain
people. Their lower towns (east of the Blue Ridge) studded the northern parts of
Oconee and Pickens counties, and, until abandoned account of Creek hostility,
northeastern Georgia east of the Blue Ridge; their valley towns, the upper
waters of the Hiwassee and the vales of its tributary the Valley River southeast
of the Unaka Mountains (the southern extension of the Great Smokies); their
middle towns, the valleys of the Little Tennessee and its tributaries southeast
of the Great Smokies; and their overhill towns, southeast of the valleys of the
Tennessee and its tributaries west of the Great Smokies. In this vast area they
gathered the hundreds of thousands of deerskins and much smaller quantities of
other pelts which for sixty years formed one of the principal exports of
Charleston. But these hunting preserves had to be held at the cost of frequent
wars. The distinctive home of the nation comprised about fifty villages in the
heart of the Appalachians 400 miles long, extending from the northeastern corner
of the present Tennessee to the northeastern corner of Alabama and spreading
eastward to 200 miles in width toward its southern part, embracing 40,000 square
miles. There were also mere hunting settlements or temporary outposts, and
villages in north Georgia abandoned because of Creek hostility.

About 1735 the Cherokees were said to number 6,000 warriors. About 1765 they
could muster only 2,300.

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