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From: Andy & Cathie Langdale <>
Subject: [NativeAmericanDelmarva] CHEROKEE SETTLEMENTS
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 11:47:49 -0400


I want to note again, this book is called "Qualla-Home of the Middle Cherokee Settlement" by T. Walter Middleton

This one is about STEKOAH---A spoiled Brat - Part I

>From the time necsiisty governed those older colonies of people to the age when society grows proper and complex, one looks for and finds the same human elements essential to the making of a good story. What people do for fun in one generation would just about turn any other generation on for a belly laugh. What people risk their necks for in one era, we usually find evidence indicating the same went on at other times and other places.

People love when they are happy, weep when they are sad. The are just as alo\ive and aware when they are called primitive as they are when they are called civilized. People are just as dead when they are killed with a stone-tipped spear as when a hydrogen bomb explodes.

Reality to the folk that lived in the little settlement of Stekoah was being content, living among frineds and neighbors. It was being born and dying, hearing the wind play God among the treetops or seeing the sun creating little sparkling doo-dads on the glistening river or rainbows in the air.

Somewhere nearby, a hundred and twenty houses were unevenly spaced around the skirt of the hill, a few more or less depending on what century you looked in on them. Stekoah's hunting ground extended up Nation's Creek and Barker's Creek on the same side of the river, then into the Big and Little Laurel country.

Across Tuckasegee River toward the north was the gareway to the Qualla area and
the Great Smokies. Similar Indian towns and villages occupied other suitable locations in that direction.

Six miles downstream and across the river at Ela was Kituhwa, the mother town of them all. Dating back into eary Middle Settlement history, Stekoah was little more than just another swarm of Kituhwa bees, chips off the same old black. Their personalities were the same. That old Kituhwa pride and passion, her Principal People philosophy; it was all bred into her children. They were somebody!

Those who know the Cherokee language best say that at one time Stekoah might have meant, "the baby one." Those parental apron strings were never really severed and the town remained a spoiled brat most of its lifetime. Tribal problems or trouble, either real or imaginary, usually always brought the same reaction from both Kituhwa and Stekoah. They stuck together like corn on the same cob.

Time eventually came when white traders moved into Cherokee Country and established trading posts. People who know say that the French came and were
pushed out by the English. In teh 1730's, a post was built in Stekoah by Bernard Hughes. Traders reported freuent flare-ups of anti-white bitterness or resentment and hate that surfaced at times wtih its beady eyes and forked tongue looking like Kituhwa meanness. Raids were common on storehouses and supplies. Killings sometime took place. Leadership in more powerful towns quelled such riots and quieted them down. It was improtant that they stay on safe grounds and trading terms with the English.

Col. James Grant, who destroyed Stekoah in 1761, gave us a quick shapshot of the empty town when he described his activites there just prior to firing the place and destroying their crops. Its layout and looks differed little from other Cherokee town. The people built it back the same way. Then in 1776, General Griffeth Rutherford again burned Stekoah. In 1781, John Sevier did the same. As if that wasn't enough, in about 1804, the village was said to have been acidentally ignited and went up in flames.

Since then it has been attributed to arson because two other towns were burned a day apart. Cowechee, a little settlement just across Catouchi (Cowee) Mountains
from Stekoah, was next. Then Tassee, located in the forks of Callasajah and Little Tanise Rivers, was the other victim. Espionage activies undoubedly went on back the, too. They would continue against the Cherokee until their precious land was in white possession and a majority of teh Indians were pushed west of the Mississippi. Stekoah was a victim of the "big white push."



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