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The following data is extracted from Cherokee of the Smoky Mountains.

In the southwestern corner of North Carolina is a band of Cherokee Indians. By a strange streak of fate, they alone, of a once powerful tribe, have been left in possession of a fragment of their ancient realm. They hold what is known as the Qualla boundary, about ninety square miles of rough country on the southerly slope of the Great Smoky Mountains. From time immemorial this natural fastness has been a refuge of their people in case of disaster.

The Cherokees are of Iroquoian stock or affinity, and apparently of northern origin. At some remote period they migrated southwestward along a route long afterward followed by the first white settlers of western Virginia and Carolina. With the high Appalachians as a center and stronghold, they spread over the adjoining lowlands in seven of our present States.

The original nucleus of the tribe, in the South, seems to have been the Kituhwa settlement, near the lower edge of what is now the Qualla boundary, adjoining the site of Bryson City, North Carolina. Their national capitol was Echota, just above the mouth of Tellico River, in southwestern Tennessee.

It was a quest for gold that first led white men into the Cherokee country, and nearly three centuries later it was another gold fever of the whites that wrought the Cherokees’ undoing.

In 1540 the Spanish explorer, Do Soto, came to an Indian town on the lower Savannah that was governed by a woman chief or "queen." here he was shown implements of copper that appeared to be mixed with precious metal. These, he was told, came from a mountain province on the north.

De Soto seized the Indian queen as a prisoner and compelled her to go with him as a guide. She, however, led him astray over mazy courses and finally made her escape, leaving him in a bare wilderness with his men and horses fairly worn out with hunger

Source: Cherokee of the Smoky Mountains

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