The site of the ancient Cherokee town of Cowee is in a hollow among the hills a dozen miles north of Franklin. There is a whisper of a path leading down from the valley road to a swinging bridge over the Little Tennessee and into a flat green plain out of which rose a lofty mound carpeted with grass.
On a spring day, over 200 years ago, William Bartram, the botanist stood waist high among its unplucked flowers and looked out across a town of some one hundred dwellings. The settlement, he wrote later “is esteemed the capital town” of the Cherokee and is “situated on the bases of the hills on both sides of the river, near to its bank”.
Now, as then, “ridges of hills rise grand and sublimely one above and beyond another, some boldly and majestically advancing into the verdant plain, their feet bathed with the silver flood of the Tanase, whilst others far distant veiled in blue mists, sublimely mounting aloft with greater majesty life up their pompous crests, and overlook vast regions.”
Nobody knows when the Cherokee built their first town here, but it was recognized as an important settlement when Hernando DeSoto came this way in 1540 on a mad search for gold. Juan Pardo, another Spanish adventurer, visited it in 1567.
Before the day of the long hunters and the pioneer settler, this was the frontier of the traders. Among the first of the traders to come to live among the Cherokee was Ludovick Grant, a Scot of a ruined Jacobite family, who chose the highlands of the Cherokees as a wilderness substitute for his own lost highlands, and became a man of great influence among the Cherokees. It was Grant who introduced the Cherokee of Cowee to Sir Alexander Cuming, a Scottish baronet, who caused the Cherokee to sign their first treaty with the white man in 1730.
Another visitor to Cowee a few years later was Christian Gottlieb Priber, a utopian socialist, who tried to establish a communist empire, the first in the world, among the Cherokee.
Not all of the strangers came in peace. Such a man was Col. John Sevier, who led his army of Over-Mountain Men into the valley in 1781 and burned the town of Cowee. But the Cherokee built back upon the ashes, continuing to live here until they were forced by the white man to cede their land around 1817. Now there is only pastureland where the town of Cowee once stood.
The only description of the town of Cowee is one Bartram wrote down in his book of “Travels”. The people of Cowee, like all the Cherokee lived where they had mountains at their back and a river in their front. The town of Cowee itself lay in a flat green valley between the high ground and the river. It blended unobtrusively into its surroundings. It made no great display of its presence.
In the center of the town, not far from the friendly river, rose the townhouse, pitched on its lofty mound, its one narrow door reached by steps cut in the earth or by a slanting path. It gave the general effect of a tower or rotunda, since it occupied most of the space on the top of the mound and was made of logs set upright in a circle, the plastered, roof and all, with earth. This was the community center. Within its firelit interior, warriors met in council, religious feasts were celebrated, and communal dances were held.
Bartran described the Cowee townhouse as being capable of accommodating several hundred people, standing on the top of an ancient artificial mount of earth, of about 20 feet perpendicular, and the rotunda on the top of it being about 30 feet more. “This gives the whole fabric” he wrote, “an elevation of about 60 feet from the common surface of the ground.”
The Little Tennessee flowing by Cowee was a roadway connecting them with neighbors and with distant nations. The made little use of the bark canoe favored by the northern Indians but preferred the “dugout canoe” which was hallowed and shaped by fire from a poplar log.
Now the river flows quietly through the valley. The dugout canoe no longer travels on its bosom. And the ancient town of Cowee is only ashes long turned under the sod by the plow. The only reminder that it ever existed is when somebody comes this way and turns up an arrowhead or a spearpoint or a shard of pottery.