The stars hung low in the night over the Indian village of Sand Town where a Cherokee chief lay in death. His widow, hugging her grief unto herself, sat staring into the fire.
There were only the cries of the whippoorwills and the requiems of the tree frogs that croaked a litany.
Death had been slow in coming to Shuttahsotee, the last chief of the Sand Town Indians who was known to his white friends as Jim Peckerwood. For weeks he had been confined to his bed and knew that soon he would enter the “Long Sleep”.
Almost daily, during this time, his friend Albert Siler had come to read the Bible to him and to pray with him. And on a recent visit the old chief had told Siler: “Shuttahsotee goin’ soon. Bury Shuttahsotee like a white man”. Siler promised him he would be buried like a white man. And then a few days later when Siler came to see him, the old chief looked out toward the setting sun and said: “This last time Shattahsotee see sun go behind mountain”.
During the night, the old chief died.
The funeral arrangements were made, and the next day they brought the body of the old Indian to the Siler family cemetery. The Rev. John A Deal, an Episcopalian clergyman, preached the funeral. A large gathering of Indians crowded the burial ground. Their white friends were there, too, paying a final tribute.
Following the funeral Siler went to see Cunstagi, the old chief’s widow. It was late afternoon and she was sitting in the doorway of the cabin gazing toward the sunset. “Shuttahsotee call Cunstagi,” she said. “Cunstagi go.”
He was not surprised when the old Indian’s son came to his house the next morning and said: “Cunstagi go to Shuttahsotee”. Siler said, “Was she sick?” And the son said, “No, She just sit in the doorway, Watch sun go, then she go.”
And once again, just a day after Shuttahsotee’s burial, the Indians of Sand Town and their white friends gathered at the Siler cemetery. They placed Cunstagi’s body beside Shuttahsotee.
And there they lie today, the old chief and his wife.
In 1932, a giant bolder of native granite that stands six feet tall. Carved into are the names of the old Indian couple and the date 1879. Church records show that they actually died in 1878.
Shuttahsotee and Cunstagi were born in the mountains. In 1838 when the federal troops came in and rounded up all the Cherokee and started them off under protest to Oklahoma, Shuttahsotee and Cunstagi were among the masses. When the troops got the couple to Tennessee, they escaped and came back to their mountains. They eventually got a small tract of land on Muskrat Creek so the government could not move them again and they lived there until their deaths.