Thomas Divide, the long ridge between the Deep Creek and Oconaluftee valleys, is named for William Holland Thomas, a fatherless store clerk adopted by the Oconaluftee chief Yonaguska, who grew up to become the Cherokee's lawyer. In the Civil War he raised a legion that enlisted more than four hundred Cherokee. Boone tells of a January crossing of the Smokies at Indian Gap, and what it took to get the cannon over the top.
They brought cannon over these mountains in January. On ropes. Somewhere through these trees, a long ridge called Thomas Divide runs south toward Bryson City, and it carries the name of a white man the Cherokee of this valley took in as one of their own, William Holland Thomas. He was a fatherless boy clerking at a trading store when the chief Yonaguska adopted him and named him Little Will, on account of his size. His first employer couldn't pay him, so he handed the boy a stack of secondhand law books instead. Thomas read them, and he grew up to be the Cherokee's lawyer. North Carolina wouldn't let a Cherokee sign a contract. So the land was bought in Thomas's name, some fifty thousand acres by eighteen forty, the heart of what's now the Qualla Boundary. Now don't go calling that charity. The Museum of the Cherokee People will set you straight on who did what. Cherokee people enlisted his help, and they bought their land back. Then the war came. Thomas raised a legion for the Confederacy, and more than four hundred Cherokee joined it, and he hoped it might make the state own them as citizens at last. You turn that over a minute. Those men went off to fight for a state that, a generation before, wouldn't even let them sign a contract. In January of eighteen sixty-four, Thomas, fifty-eight years old, and about a hundred of his Legion, Cherokee and white, joined General Robert Vance's column to cross the Smokies at Indian Gap. That's up on the crest, about a mile west of Newfound Gap, and it was the kind of bitter cold you can't call to mind with a heater running. His own men had worked that road two years before, and it was still too rough for a gun to ride on its carriage. At the top, the men took the artillery apart. Teams carried the wheels and the axles, and the gun barrels went down the Tennessee side on ropes, rolled and pushed and dragged. One historian called it gun metal screeching on naked rock. There was a sergeant in that legion named Swimmer. Years later, close to three quarters of the stories in James Mooney's book of Cherokee myths came from that one man. Up there in January, you'd have heard two sounds. Iron grinding down a winter mountainside at the end of a rope, and low under it, a sergeant's voice, carrying more stories in his head than all those men together carried on their backs.
Photo: Contemporary photograph, photographer unknown; via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain