Drowning Bear

Keep an eye on that river as you go. One old man refused to leave it, and his people are still here. In the early eighteen hundreds the Cherokee along this Oconaluftee River had a chief named Yonaguska. White people called him Drowning Bear, and the name means the bear drowns him. His people became the heart of today's Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. As James Mooney set it down, when Yonaguska was about sixty he took sick and fell into a trance, and his people mourned him for dead. A full day later he woke. He told them he had been to the spirit world and sent back with a message. That is as far as I'll carry that part. It belongs to his people. Here's what got written down. He had a pledge drawn up that his town would give up whiskey. He signed it first, and the town signed after him. When the Gospel of Matthew first came out in Cherokee, he had it read to him before anybody else. Then he said, well, it seems to be a good book. Strange that the white people are not better, after having had it so long. He refused to take his people west. He told them these rocks and mountains would keep them safer than any country a white man could find a use for. Under a treaty of eighteen nineteen, his people had stepped out of the Cherokee Nation, and the removal commissioners accepted them as citizens of North Carolina, and let them be. They stayed. Mooney tells the end this way. In April of eighteen thirty-nine, dying, he had his people carry him into the townhouse on Soco. He told them to take Will Thomas for their chief, the white boy he had adopted. He warned them never to leave their country. Then he drew his blanket around him, lay back, and was gone. I come down to this water some evenings with that blanket on my mind. It runs on past the same rocks, down toward Cherokee, where the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the people in that townhouse are sitting down to supper.