Yonaguska

Yonaguska, who was also known as Drowning Bear (the English approximation of his name), was a figure of persistence and endurance in the story of the Cherokee. He was a reformer who banished alcoholic drinks from his land and his people after receiving a vision warning him to do so. Yonaguska challenged Rev. Schermerhorn to explain the terms of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota that a handful of Cherokee had signed. He is also the only chief who remained in the hills to rebuild the Eastern Band with others who had escaped or eluded the soldiers. His adopted son, William Thomas, the only white chief the Cherokee ever had, would carry on Yonaguska’s work to establish what is now the Qualla Boundary. During his life, however, Yonaguska was also a reformer and a prophet, a leader who recognized the power of the white man’s liquor and early on realized the lengths to which settlers would go to take over Cherokee lands.

Early life

Yonaguska was born about 1759, some 40 years after English traders introduced rum to his people in the North Carolina mountains. He was described as strikingly handsome, strongly built, standing 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m), with a faint tinge of red—due to a slight strain of white blood on his father’s side—relieving the brown of his cheek. Like many dedicated reformers, Yonaguska’s resolve was strengthened by first-hand experience—he had been addicted to alcohol most of his life.

Awakening

When he was 60 years old and critically ill, Yonaguska fell into a trance. Certain that the end had come, his people gathered around him at the Soco townhouse and mourned him for dead. At the end of 24 hours, however, Yonaguska awoke to consciousness and spoke to his people, among whom was his adopted son William Holland Thomas, a 14-year-old white boy who was destined to succeed him as chief and become the only white man ever to serve as chief of the tribe. When the chief addressed his people, he relayed a message from the spirit world: “The Cherokee must never again drink whiskey. Whiskey must be banished.” He then had Will Thomas write out a pledge: “The undersigned Cherokees, belonging to the town of Qualla,” it read, “agree to abandon the use of spirituous liquors.” Yonaguska then signed it, followed by the whole council and town. Preserved among Thomas’ papers, the pledge is now in the archives of the Mountain Heritage Center at Western Carolina University. From the signing of the pledge until his death in 1839 at the age of 80, whiskey was almost unknown among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. And when any of his people broke the pledge—few did while he was alive—Yonaguska enforced the edict with the whipping post and lash.

Yonaguska was the first among his people to perceive the white man’s takeover of their mountain kingdom. As a boy of 12, he had such a vision and spoke of it, but no one paid any attention to him. As a young man, he had witnessed the havoc wreaked among his people when Gen. Griffith Rutherford and his North Carolina militia burned 36 Indian towns in 1776. Throughout the early 19th century Yonaguska was repeatedly pressured to induce his people to remove to the West. He firmly resisted every effort, declaring that the Indians were safer from aggression among their rocks and mountains and that the Cherokee belonged in their ancestral homeland. After the Cherokee lands on the Tuckasegee River were sold as part of the Treaty of 1819, Yonaguska continued to live on 640 acres (2.6 km²) set aside for him in a bend of the river between Ela and Bryson City, on the ancient site of the Cherokee town of Kituwa.

As pressure increased for Indian removal, Yonaguska became more determined than ever to remain in his homeland, rejecting every government offer for removal west. He refused to accept government assurances that his people would be left alone in the promised western lands. In the course of his life, he had seen settlers push ever westward. Yonaguska knew that nothing short of complete control would ever satisfy them. “As to the white man’s promises of protection,” he is said to have told government representatives, “they have been too often broken; they are like the reeds in yonder river—they are all lies.”

When the Gospel of St Matthew was translated into Cherokee and published, Yonaguska insisted on it being read to him first before allowing its circulation. Yonaguska's comment on Matthew was:^[1]

"Well, it seems a good book - strange that the white people are no better, after having had it so long."

despite his reservations about how the whites regarded it, Yonaguska approved the scriptures to be given to his people.

Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

Establishing The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1824 from among those Cherokee in the State of North Carolina but left outside the bounds of the Cherokee Nation as reduced by the treaties of 1817 and 1819, Yonaguska gathered those left about him and settled at Soco Creek on lands purchased for them by his adopted son, Will Thomas. As a white man, Thomas could legally hold a deed to the lands and allow the Cherokee to live on them. This was the birth of Qualla Boundary.

Death

Shortly before his death in April, 1839, Yonaguska had himself carried into the townhouse at Soco where, sitting up on a couch, he made a last talk to his people. The old man commended Thomas to them as their chief and again warned them against ever leaving their own country. Then wrapping his blanket around him, he quietly lay back and died. Yonaguska, the most prominent chief ever of the Eastern Band, was buried beside Soco Creek, about a mile below the old Macedonia mission, with a crude mound of stones to mark the spot.

References

1. ^ Kephart, Horace (1936). The Cherokees of the Smoky mountains;. Ithaca, N.Y.: The Atkinson press. LCC E99.C5 K4.  LCCN 36-280 p31

Hicks, James R. "Cherokee Lineages" Register Report of Drowning Bear http://www.genealogy.com/users/h/i/c/James-R-Hicks-VA/BOOK-0001/0003-0019.html#CHILD70

Sources

• Blankenship, Bob. Cherokee Roots, Volume 1: Eastern Cherokee Rolls. (Cherokee: Bob Blankenship, 1992).
• Brown, John P. Old Frontiers: The Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their Removal to the West, 1838. (Kingsport: Southern Publishers, 1938).
• Ehle, John. The Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. (New York: Doubleday, 1989).
• Finger, John R. The Eastern Band of Cherokees 1819-1900. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).
• Lumpkin, Wilson. The Removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia. (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1907).
• Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee. (Nashville: Charles and Randy Elder-Booksellers, 1982).
• Smithsonian Institution, Mooney's American Bureau of Ethnology Records, Photograph of Katalsta & Ewi Katalsta, daughter & grand-daughter of Yonaguska/Yanaguski.
• Hicks, James R. "Cherokee Lineages" Register Report of Drowning Bear

http://www.genealogy.com/users/h/i/c/James-R-Hicks-VA/BOOK-0001/0003-0019.html#CHILD70 JOHN GA-SU-YO-GI3 LITTLEJOHN (JINNY2, DROWNING1 BEAR, CHIEF) Harrison E. Coleman (JOHN GA-SU-YO-GI3 LITTLEJOHN, JINNY2, DROWNING1 BEAR, CHIEF) JOHN NICKODEMUS5 COLEMAN, b. 1877, North Carolina; d. Aft. 1906. 1882-84 Hester roll: Charleston, Swain Co, NC, fam# 281, roll# 988 1904 Census, CNE: #1366 GEORGE WASHINGTON COLEMAN, b. 1879, North Carolina; d. Aft. 1906. 1882-84 Hester roll: Charleston, Swain Co, NC, fam# 281, roll# 989 1904 Census, CNE: #1367 WILLIAM EDWARD COLEMAN, b. 1881, North Carolina; d. Aft. 1906. 1882-84 Hester roll: Charleston, Swain Co, NC, fam# 281, roll# 990 1904 Census, CNE: #1368 SIMON PETER COLEMAN, b. 1883; d. Aft. 1906. 1904 Census, CNE: #1369 REBECCA COLEMAN, b. 1887, North Carolina; d. Aft. 1906; m. _____ THOMAS; b. Abt. 1880. 1904 Census, CNE: #1370 NANCY COLEMAN, b. 1890. 1904 Census, CNE: #1371 JOSEPH COLEMAN, b. 1891. 1904 Census, CNE: #1372 LULA COLEMAN, b. 1893. 1904 Census, CNE: #1373 BIRDIE COLEMAN, b. 1896. 1904 Census, CNE: #1374 CALVIN COLEMAN, b. 1899. 1904 Census, CNE: #1375 JULIE COLEMAN, b. 1902. 1904 Census, CNE: #1376

• (Eastern Band Cherokee Women - Cultural Persistence in Their Letters and Speeches, by Virginia Moore Carney,University of Tennessee Press/Knoxville 2005
• Indians At Hampton Institute 1877-1923 By Donal F. Lindsey, University of Illinois Press Urbana and Chicago 1995

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Date of death	1839
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