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The Tsali affair is among the most celebrated episodes in the history of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Tsali, or Charley, was an elderly Cherokee who lived on the banks of the Nantahala River in western North Carolina at the time of the forced Cherokee removal to Oklahoma in 1838.1 In order to avoid being forced to leave their homeland, Tsali and members of his family hid in the mountains, but they were apprehended by soldiers sent to capture those Cherokees who were attempting to evade removal. While being escorted to the holding camp from which they were to be sent west, Tsali and some of his kinsmen killed two of the soldiers who were guarding them and escaped back into the mountains. Subsequently, they were captured and executed by other Cherokees who were induced to assist the army by a promise that they would be rewarded for their help by being allowed to remain in western North Carolina. Each year thousands of visitors see a ¤ctionalized version of the Tsali story as it is told in the outdoor drama “Unto These Hills,” presented in summer on the Cherokee Reservation in western North Carolina. The story has also inspired a novel (Bedford 1972), has been treated in depth in at least three scholarly articles (Finger 1979; King and Evans 1979a; Kutsche 1963), and has been examined in varying degrees of detail in numerous works on the Cherokees and on the history of western North Carolina (e.g., Arthur 1914:577–580; Browder 1980:68–70, 234–236; Finger 1984:21–28; French 1998:48, 67–69; Mooney 1982:131; Woodward 1963:12–13). One of the ri®es used to execute Tsali is among the exhibits at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee , North Carolina. 6 / New Light on the Tsali Affair William Martin Jurgelski Interest in the story is in keeping with its power. The most poignant incarnation of the tale (see Mooney 1982:131), in which Tsali voluntarily surrenders and faces execution so that his people can stay in their homeland, is nothing short of a modern-day creation myth for the Eastern Band of Cherokee (Figure 6.1). But with substantial interest has come a substantial distortion of the facts, to the extent that Duane King and E. Raymond Evans, the authors of a 1979 article on Tsali, were moved to remark that “in examining the literature , it is possible to ¤nd erroneous statements on each conceivable aspect of the Tsali episode including the motives and roles of the principal characters and basic facts of timing, location, numbers and people involved” (King and Evans 1979a:196). King and Evans’s critical examination of the Tsali story and those of John Finger (Finger 1979, 1984:21–28), Paul Kutsche (Kutsche 1963), and others have done a great deal to dispel the mythology that has grown up around the Tsali affair. Nonetheless, questions about the events that occurred and the people involved in those events remain. A recently discovered document sheds new light on some of these questions . The document is a memorial or statement of facts written on behalf of Nanih (Nancy), the wife of Tsali.2 The memorial was part of a claim submitted to the federal government in an attempt to gain compensation for Nanih under the terms of the Treaty of 1835, the treaty that resulted in the forced relocation of most of the Cherokees west of the Mississippi. The claim was duly considered, and like many of the other Cherokee claims, it was rejected,¤led away, and forgotten, eventually ¤nding its way to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where I happened upon it while researching a related topic. Nanih’s memorial is important in that it is the only account of the Tsali affair that has yet come to light that was written from the perspective of a member of Tsali’s family other than Tsali’s surviving son,3 Washington (Wassituna , Wasseton). Washington served as a source for the nineteenth-century ethnographer James Mooney in his account of the affair (Mooney 1982:131), and his recollections have found their way into print as related by a Cherokee ethnographic informant named Mollie Sequoyah, who knew Washington when she was a child (King and Evans 1979b; Kutsche 1963:340–343). NANIH’S MEMORIAL A transcription of Nanih’s memorial is presented below. Portions of the original manuscript are dif¤cult to decipher (Figure 6.2). Where the exact reading...

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