The Chief Who Saved a President

Down at the end of your drive, in Robbinsville, there's a grave on a hill that every American ought to visit, because the man in it has a story that'll make your blood boil and break your heart in the same breath. His name was Junaluska, a Cherokee chief, and here is what this country did to him.

Go back to eighteen fourteen, the Creek War. A young American general named Andrew Jackson is in a desperate fight at a place called Horseshoe Bend, and it's going badly. Junaluska is there — he'd brought hundreds of Cherokee warriors to fight alongside Jackson. And in the thick of it, Junaluska's men swim the river, steal the enemy's canoes, and break the whole battle open. That maneuver turned the fight and handed Jackson the victory that made him a national hero — the victory that put him on the road to the White House. The Cherokee saved Andrew Jackson's day, and the old tradition says Junaluska personally saved Jackson's life.

Now hold that in your head, and jump forward twenty-four years. That same Andrew Jackson, now president, is the man who orders the Cherokee removed from these mountains — the Trail of Tears. Junaluska — the man who saved him — is rounded up with everyone else and marched to Oklahoma. They say when he understood what was happening, he grieved that if he had known at Horseshoe Bend what he knew now, history would have gone a different way.

But here's the part that lifts it. Junaluska would not stay gone. He walked. All the way back from Oklahoma to these mountains, hundreds and hundreds of miles, home. And in eighteen forty-seven North Carolina did one decent thing: they granted him citizenship, a hundred dollars, and three hundred and thirty-seven acres of his own homeland back. He lived out his days here and was buried up on that hill in Robbinsville, his grave ringed with stones for the seven Cherokee clans. Go stand there when you finish this drive. A man saved a president, was betrayed by that same president, walked a thousand miles home, and lies now in the mountains that were always his. You remember his name: Junaluska.