The People Who Hid in the Mountains

I told you the Cherokee were removed from this country — marched west on the Trail of Tears out of these very valleys. And that's true. But it is not the whole truth, and the rest of it is one of the most stubborn, quietly heroic stories in these mountains. Because not everyone went. Some of them hid. And their descendants are living right down there around Robbinsville this very day.

When the soldiers came in eighteen thirty-eight to round up the Cherokee, some families simply would not be taken. They melted up into the high coves and laurel hells of these mountains — country they knew the way you know your own kitchen in the dark, and country the soldiers found near impossible to search. They lived rough, they lived hidden, they moved by night, and they waited out the removal in the folds of their own homeland rather than be driven from it. And when the worst had passed, they came down and stayed.

The community around here is called Snowbird — a few hundred people up along Snowbird Creek and the Cheoah, part of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, but tucked away about fifty miles from the main Cherokee lands, keeping to themselves. They're known for holding the old ways tightest of all — many still speak Cherokee, in a dialect all their own, and they've guarded their traditions across two hundred years precisely because they were remote and overlooked.

So this isn't a story that ends with everyone marched away in sorrow. Part of it ends with people who looked at the whole force of the United States government coming to take their home, and answered: no. We are the mountains, and the mountains do not leave. Drive down into Robbinsville with a little respect. Some of the folks you pass are the direct descendants of the ones who would not go — still here, still home, exactly as their ancestors intended.