Nikwasi

Immortals Can’t Protect a Cherokee Town

Location


View Larger Map

Other maps: Bing, Google, MapQuest.
Coordinates: 35.1848, -83.3739.

Type: Sight
Tour: Cherokee
County: Macon

Access LogoFull

Though it looks like a parking lot, Nikwasi Lane at the coordinates is a public street. Park next to the grass-covered mound. If you wish, walk to the display at the south end of the mound (to the right).

Context

In retaliation for a series of attacks on European-Americans by Cherokees resisting incursions on their lands in 1776, commanders from the Carolinas and Virginia have launched coordinated campaigns to destroy their villages.

Situation

Cherokee

Warned by people retreating across Cowee/Watauga Gap of the approaching North Carolina army, those unable to fight have crossed the western mountains to refuge. Most of the men await the armies along the main route deeper into the mountains at Wayah Gap (see Battle of the Black Hole).

Militia

After crossing the Cowee/Watauga Gap, the army of part-time “militia” soldiers under Brig. Gen. Griffith Rutherford has occupied the village of Wata´gi to the north of modern Franklin.

Dates

Tuesday, September 10–Monday, September 30, 1776.

Timeline

Imagine the Scene

The Mound of the Immortals

Franklin has replaced the village of Nĭkwăsĭ´ (pronounced “nee-kwah-SEE”[1]). In the summer of 1776 log houses, farm fields, wooden sweat lodges, and one or more granaries cover 100 acres[2] surrounding this mound. As made clear by the drawing on the marker, what is left of the mound is less than a third of the original footprint and much shorter. The mound dates back to around 1,000 C.E., built by Mississippian Culture Native Americans.

Atop it is a council house or “townhouse.” After the Cherokee moved to the area, Nĭkwăsĭ´ became a center of worship to their Creator God. A “‘fire that had always been fire’” burned on an altar in the townhouse, with the belief the Cherokees would not perish as long as the flame lasted. When other towns adopted a ritual of rekindling their sacred fires each year, the flame here was the source. A tribal storyteller said it was moved before a 1761 British invasion (see “Historical Tidbits” below), and placed in a smoke hole on the south side of Hickory Nut Mountain.[a]