Travel Guides
Cherokee Heritage Itinerary -- Tsali
The story of Tsali (Charley), immortalized in Cherokee oral history, is to this day a deeply emotional reminder of the tragedies that befell the tribe in the 1830s. When General Winfield Scott’s troops were arresting Cherokee families to send to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, Tsali, a farmer from Wesser, was taken. He and his family were forced to leave their farm and orchards, when they were arrested by two US soldiers on November 18, 1838. Along the way, it is said, Tsali and his family managed to escape, after a struggle that left the soldiers dead – and Tsali, his sons Lowney and Ridge (Nantalayee Jake), and son-in-law Nantalayee George, wanted men.
About 400 other people had already taken to the forests during the Cherokee removal, evading capture (and in some cases living in the area openly, having received permits). When Tsali and his family fled into the deep mountains during the latter half of 1838, the US Army’s attention returned to the fugitive population with fiercer scrutiny than before. Tradition says that the Army proposed a bargain to the Cherokee people: if Tsali and the other men in his family would submit to arrest and execution, the Army would allow the rest of the refugees in that part of the mountains to remain on their land. Tsali was arrested and executed by firing squad, as were Lowney, Ridge, and Nantahala George, separately. (Grandson Wasituna, or Washington, was spared on account of his youth.) Oral history tells that Tsali insisted that fellow Cherokees rather than white soldiers make up the firing squad. Tsali, Lowney, Ridge, and Nantayalee George’s graves are now under Lake Fontana.