The Town That Named a State

Look around at this quiet river country you're driving through — because you're not on the edge of the Cherokee world here, friend. You're standing in the very middle of it. Or you were. This valley, the Little Tennessee and the Tellico, was the beating heart of the whole Cherokee Nation — its capital, its holy ground, and the place that gave a whole American state its name. And most of it is underwater now.

Back in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, these river bottoms held the great Overhill Towns, the mother towns of the Cherokee. The town of Tellico, that your drive started from at Tellico Plains, is named for one of them: Great Tellico. Just downriver stood Chota, the 'beloved town' — the Cherokee capital, a city of refuge where no blood could be shed and any soul could find sanctuary, home to great leaders like the war chief Oconostota. This was no scattering of huts. This was the seat of a nation, with diplomacy and law and a thousand years of roots.

And right beside Chota sat a town called Tanasi. Now say that name slow: Tanasi. Tanase. Tennessee. That little Cherokee town, that most folks have never heard of, is where the whole state of Tennessee got its name — seven million people living in a state named for one Cherokee village on this river.

Now here's the ache of it. After the Cherokee were driven out, the river kept their towns a while, the old sites still there in the bottomland, sacred ground. And then, in nineteen seventy-nine, over the fierce objection of the Cherokee and a lot of other folks, they finished the Tellico Dam and flooded this valley. Chota, Tanasi, the mother towns — most of them vanished under the still water of a reservoir. The capital of the Cherokee Nation, the very ground the state is named for, lies at the bottom of a lake.

So as you drive, hold the strangeness of it. You're on a road named half for the Cherokee, in a state named for a Cherokee town — and that town itself is drowned and gone. The name floats on the surface, all around you, on every map and every sign. The place it came from lies quiet underneath. That's about as American a story as I know how to tell you.