The Movement of Great Tellico: The Role of Town and Clan in Cherokee Spatial Understanding

On October 13, 1736, Captain Raymond Deméré arrived at a spot three miles from the future site of Fort Loudon. On arrival he encountered problems, learning that "23 fellows from Great Tellico … were sett out three Days before for" the French at Alabama Fort.¹ Deméré saw this movement from within the arena of European politics: the Cherokee visit to the French became a step that would challenge, and possibly break, the political alliance of the Overhill Cherokees and the British. Indeed, just ten days earlier Deméré had placed such action specifically in terms of the ongoing British-French rivalry for geographic control of the region. Addressing Cherokee leaders Old Hopp and Little Carpenter, Deméré stated that what was at that time a potential defection, derived from the "Ambition of the French who wanted the whole Continent of America to themselves."² It is not, however, the machinations of various European parties but rather Cherokee behavior that this article examines. How was such movement possible; how did one village decide and begin movement, both political and physical, from one location to another?

British colonists promoted a comprehension of space based on fixidity, definition, domestication, and control. Disembarking from their ships on the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean, the British encountered a nation, the Cherokees, whose own spatial persona was quite differently constructed; a spatial persona that recognized that discrete spaces functioned within a duality of fixed spaces and movement between those spaces. An investigation of interactions between town and clan identities, particularly in reference to events in the town of Great Tellico in the mid-eighteenth century, exposes the ways in which Cherokee spatial personae worked as a dynamic part of the broader colonial story.³

Within secondary literature there appears to be a sense of confusion regarding the primary constructive aspect of Cherokee identity. Legal historian John Phillip Reid, for example, has detailed Cherokee towns as the "basic political unit" or alternatively the "basic unit of Government" within Cherokee society. Anthropologist Circe Sturm, however, has highlighted the importance of the clan, claiming that "membership in a clan was more important than membership in anything else." Moreover, she has argued, Cherokees "distinguished themselves from Europeans, Africans, and other Native Americans not by skin color, race, or even language, but by membership in a Cherokee clan." Considering the spatial persona of the Cherokees provides a way to reconcile such different arguments about the core of Cherokee identity.⁴

The duality that existed within the Cherokee spatial persona was rooted within two civic institutions, towns and clans. Towns centered around town houses, which provided the opportunity to recognize and assert locational differences and which facilitated diplomatic relations with external groups, both native and nonnative. Simultaneously overlaying the construction of towns as discrete spaces and interacting with them, we find clans. Cherokees lived and acted within an extended kinship network consisting of seven matrilineal clans. Individual members of a clan claimed a common ancestry with all other members of the same clan even if they had never met or were from different towns. The Cherokee clan system permitted, and indeed encouraged, safe and structured movement between the discrete spaces of Cherokee towns. Clans were the facet of the Cherokee spatial persona that allowed defiance of the fixidity offered by towns. Additionally, such interlocking facets of the Cherokee spatial persona were divided in a gendered fashion. Clan authority was vested in Cherokee women and based around the home, while male authority resided in the town house.⁵

Eighteenth-century towns consisted of a nucleated settlement, usually situated on or near a river or creek, with a centrally located town house. Settlement populations were between one hundred and three hundred people spread across fifteen to sixty houses, although on occasion settlements were larger. Town size was maintained through a process of physical withdrawal. As a town's population grew to an unmanageable size, or when political disaffection occurred, populations splintered and new villages or towns were created. The precise number, location, and division of town sites during the early...