Cherokee Part 2

Cherokee life and culture greatly resembled that of the Creek and other Indians of the Southeast.  When first encountered by Europeans in the mid-16th century, the Cherokee possessed a variety of stone implements including knives, axes, and chisels.

They wove baskets, made pottery, and cultivated corn (maize), beans, and squash. Deer, bear, and elk furnished meat and clothing. Cherokee dwellings were windowless log cabins roofed with bark, with one door and a smokehole in the roof. A typical Cherokee town had between 30 and 60 such houses and a council house where general meetings were held and the sacred fire burned. An important religious ceremony was the Busk, or Green Corn, festival, a first-fruits and new-fires rite.

The Cherokee wars and treaties, a series of battles and agreements around the period of the U.S. War of Independence, effectively reduced Cherokee power and landholdings in Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and western North and South Carolina, freeing this territory for speculation and settlement by the white man. Numbering about 22,000 tribesmen in 200 villages throughout the area, the Cherokee had since the beginning of the 18th century remained friendly to the British in both trading and military affairs.

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