Otter Place

Ever wonder where a name like 'Cades Cove' even comes from? It's a stranger question than it sounds, and the answer is written all over the map in a language most folks driving through can't read anymore.

Long before the first Oliver ever laid eyes on this valley, the Cherokee were here, and they had a name for it: Tsiyahi. It means 'Otter Place' — because otters played in these clear streams, back when the water was thick with them. There was a Cherokee settlement right in this cove, and it had a leader the settlers came to know as Chief Kade. And when the white folks needed a name for the valley, they did what people always do — they reached for the name already attached to it. 'Kade's Cove.' 'Cades Cove.' You've been driving all day through a place named, in a worn-down, half-forgotten way, for a Cherokee chief.

And it doesn't stop there. That creek that runs through the cove and tumbles off at Abrams Falls? Named for another Cherokee leader — Chief Abram, or Abraham, of the town of Chilhowee. His people called him Ooskuah. The mountains are covered in these fingerprints if you know to look — Cherokee names, worn smooth and respelled by English tongues until we forgot whose words they were.

Here's the hinge of it, though. In 1819, a treaty — the Treaty of Calhoun — ended the Cherokee claim to these Smokies, and Tsiyahi was given up. That was one year after John Oliver arrived. So the very decade the settlers were moving in, the Cherokee were being moved out by treaty — and the worst of it, the Trail of Tears, was still twenty years down the road. The otters are mostly gone now too. But every time you say 'Cades Cove,' you're speaking a little broken Cherokee, whether you meant to or not. I think that's worth knowing you're doing.