Overview: “Entanglement” describes my reckoning with a story of a genocidal military campaign against the Cherokee people in North Carolina in the early months after the Declaration of Independence was signed. I am entangled in this story by my connection to land this 2400 man militia marched over on its way to destroy more than 55 Cherokee towns. I tell the story, unknown to me until recently, as an act of resistance to counteract the current local narrative that this campaign was an act of heroism, critical to settler victory over the British in the Revolutionary War.

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Here is a story I did not know until just a few years ago, a story in which I find myself entangled through my ancestors. In September of 1776, a couple of months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a militia of over 2400 White settlers marched west from what is now Old Fort, North Carolina toward the Tuckaseegee and Little Tennessee Rivers where the Cherokee Middle Towns lay. The militia’s mission was ostensibly retaliatory, but it was settlers who moved into and stole Cherokee territory in the first place. 

Two hundred fifty years later, this campaign, which came to be known as Rutherford’s Trace, is being recast by descendants of militia members as the heroic effort of Americans to remove any chance of Cherokee alliance with the British in the coming war. In my read of this history, however, it was always about land, wanting more land, and the annihilation of anyone who stood in their way of getting it. 

What enmeshes me in this story is that militia and all that it carried with it in their 8-day journey across the mountains, marched across land that I have known all my life, land where my mother grew up and my grandparents farmed. I spent most childhood summers playing on this land. As I learned the story of Rutherford Trace, my heart stopped a beat as I recognized the route the militia took to get the Middle Towns. The route they took is well-known to me.

Their route, this trace, I have learned, was an ancient Indigenous trading path through what had been Cherokee territory for millennia. I could not stop thinking about what it would have looked  like and felt like for this mass of soldiers and their animals to move across this land, men on their way intending to destroy a people’s way of life.

Here is a short version of the bone-chilling story of what happened, a story I have also recounted in slightly different form in Ancestral Landscapes—Searching for my place in the world. This is a hard story to hear. Take a deep breath, say a prayer for everyone.

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White settlers never stopped pushing their way over boundaries set for them by the British government in the Proclamation of 1773, and the Cherokee (understandably) never stopped retaliating for the theft of their lands. As a punitive response to the Cherokee, General Griffith Rutherford raised a militia of over 2,400 men at Davidson Fort, now known as Old Fort, located just east of what is now known as Asheville, NC. A description of the day-to-day logistics of their campaign was documented in the journal kept by one of the militia men, William Lenoir. It is from his account that I was able to pinpoint the militia’s journey down through what is now US Highway 276, passing by the future site of my grandparents’ home. 

They left Davidson Fort on September 1 and continued westward through challenging mountainous terrain toward their destination. On September 8, they entered the Cherokee town of Watauga. They cut down all the crops, killed the livestock and several Cherokee men. They emptied all the houses of their possessions and burned every house to the ground. I imagine with horror the heat licking the sides of the buildings and the terror of those watching their homes consumed in flames. The militia moved to the next town and then every town afterwards along the Tuckaseegee and Little Tennessee Rivers, destroying each one in the same way. They took some Cherokee women and men as prisoners to sell as slaves, and they shot, killed, and scalped others. In one town, they forced all the women and children into one house and burned them alive. 

According to Lenoir’s journal, the militia men were surprised by how large the towns and crop fields were and at the abundance of food stored in them. They were also surprised to be met by so few men, possibly because the Middle Town warriors had left to join forces with Cherokee towns over the mountains being attacked by a Virginia militia on a similar mission. 

Rutherford had made plans to meet up with a militia from South Carolina at the Cherokee town of Nikwasi (present-day Franklin, NC) on September 10. The connection was missed, but Rutherford’s men decimated Nikwasi on their own. The North Carolina and South Carolina militia were, for a time, each setting towns ablaze on parallel paths. They did finally meet on September 26. The generals decided it was too late in the year to push further west; it would be cold soon, they were running out of supplies, and their men were exhausted. 

Each militia took the route home previously traveled by the other and continued to lay waste to any town missed by the other. Historians estimate that 55-70 towns were obliterated. It is unbearable for me to imagine the human misery.

On their way home, the White settler soldiers retraced their steps in the opposite direction, bringing with them the goods they had looted before burning down the houses and the people they had captured, some of them to be sold as slaves. They had experienced few battle casualties owing to the absence of most of the Cherokee warriors. Nonetheless, the soldiers were exhausted, cold, and hungry; many died on the return trip. 

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What was the state of their souls after causing so much damage to so many lives? Did they do what patriarchy asks of men, deny their feelings of remorse and guilt? Rationalize their violent actions as being necessary for the greater good. What seeped into the earth beneath their feet marching back home?

Those that recovered physically went on to fight the British in the American Revolutionary War, and some of them were given land as a reward, land that had been ceded by treaty from the Cherokee nation, weakened after the destruction of so many towns by Rutherford’s militia. One of these men, David Allison, was given 240,230 acres in 1796, most of what is now Haywood County, land from which my grandfathers’ tract eventually was parceled off. 

The Cherokee people in western North Carolina who survived the raids became a nation of refugees with no housing or food that winter. No one knows how many people died. Some towns were eventually rebuilt; many were abandoned. The pain of it crushed the souls and hardened the hearts of those left behind. Cherokee elders eventually sued for peace with the “American” rebel patriots in North Carolina and the surrounding states. Two treaties of 1777 divided the negotiations over two geographic regions. The treaties verbally humiliated the Cherokee who survived the fighting as the colonists demanded land for peace. Over half a million acres were ceded to colonists in those treaties. 

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My maternal lineage has deep roots in this land. I am not directly descended from any of the men who participated, but some of my ancestors were their uncles or brothers. Many of my people came here soon after the American Revolutionary War and benefited materially from pushing the Cherokee further westward. 

How had I never heard of Rutherford’s Trace growing up? It was a story hidden in plain sight. There are numerous historical plaques along the roads now built over this route commemorating Rutherford’s Trace. One of these plaques my family passed by almost daily when we visited here, but never had the time to read as we drove by. 

I finally learned about Rutherford Trace as part of a larger personal inquiry into my ancestral legacy, coming to the story first in a book written by my cousin Nadia Dean, A Demand of Blood. I found out more in an article written twenty years ago by Michael Beadle in a local paper, Smoky Mountain News, describing some people’s characterization of it as a colonial version of General Sherman’s Civil War march of terror through the South. Why, I wondered was there no outrage about Rutherford’s Trace when the story was published? Where was the sympathy for the Cherokee? Where was the rallying cry for making an apology, for repair?

The answer is that we continue to live in a White supremacist country. Relatively few people know or care about what happened. Many generations of people have benefited from Indigenous removal and genocide, including, down the line, my own ancestors, who were able to live on land that the Cherokee lost in the treaties made after their lives were destroyed through this military campaign. And as my ancestors benefited, so did I.

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I have felt the beckoning of the land they crossed that was my grandfather’s farm and the ancestor spirits alive here to be a conduit of healing. I have said “yes” to this call, but I am still in process of discernment of what exactly this healing action will require of me, no doubt for the rest of my life. Part of it is the telling of this story over and over until people actually hear it and feel compelled to find their own connection to the need for healing human and other than human relationships, for finding a way towards apology and repair. 

Another part of it is about healing the land itself. I am here for it, though I have much to learn about how live on and to steward the two acres of land passed down to me. I am learning how to listen to the land tell me what it needs on these two acres of woods, creek, and meadow. It speaks to me through the swallowtail butterflies landing on the pale pink flowers of milkweed, stands of purple ironweed, goldfinch darting in and out of the meadow, mauve flowers of Joe Pye weed pushing up past the grasses, the shade of the willow trees and the oak trees, the gurgle of creek waters falling over rocks, and the sparkle of fireflies against the night sky. 

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The stories of my ancestors are also my stories.
The land holds our stories.
We can create new stories with the land.

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