Place Names: Tennessee

In modern-day Monroe County, Tennessee under the Tellico Lake impoundment of the Little Tennessee River sits the ruins of two historic Overhill Cherokee towns, Tanasi and Chota.  The town of Tanasi gave its name to the modern-day state of Tennessee.

In 1567, Spanish explorer Juan Pardo encountered a Native village known as Tanasqui.  It's not clear exactly which tribe inhabited this town, or exactly where it was, though it is now believed to have been near the junction of the French Broad River and Pigeon River near modern-day Newport.  Sometime after the Spaniards left the area, the Cherokee began building another town in a bend of the Little Tennessee River which they called Tanasi.  No one knows now what the name means.  It could be a Cherokee borrowing of a Yuchi word for "meeting place", "winding river", or "river of the great bend".  Though the Cherokee used the word for other place names in the area, the exact meaning of the name now is lost.  The Cherokee name for the river near which the town was situated was Callamaco, though White explorers and settlers renamed the river the Little Tennessee after the town.

Tanasi served as an early capital of the Cherokee people and was an important site for traders.  An English trader by the name of Eleazar Wiggen, called Old Rabbit by the Cherokee, based out of Tanasi as early as 1711.  In 1725, South Carolina authorities dispatched Col. George Chicken (yes, that really was his name) to Tanasi to request Cherokee assistance against the Creek.  Chicken referred to the leader of Tanasi as the Tanasi Warrior who "ruled" over the Overhill, Middle and Valley towns in the region.  Another colonial emissary, Col. John Herbert, recorded meeting the Tanasi Warrior at the townhouse in the town.  The Tanasi Warrior possessed a headdress known by settlers as the Tanasi Crown.  Thinking this would be a great souvenir to present to George II, an Anglo-Scottish adventurer named Alexander Cumming staged an elaborate ploy to get hold of it.  He arranged for the "crowing" of a rival chief, Moytoy of Tellico, as "Emperor of the Cherokee" and switched out the headdress for a crown of European design.  Cumming took the headdress to England along with a delegation of Cherokee warriors that included Wiggins, Attakullakulla and several others. 

After this ceremony, Moytoy of Tellico tried to consolidate his own power in Great Tellico, a town along the Tellico River sixteen miles away from Tanasi.  However, after his death, another Cherokee leader, Old Hop of Chota rose to prominence, eventually moving the Cherokee capital from Tanasi to Chota, the adjacent town separated from Tanasi by an unnamed stream.  In 1762, Henry Timberlake reported only a few dwellings still inhabited at Tanasi, and that Chota was the more dominant town.  However, a Warrior of Tanasi signed the treaty ceding land to the Watauga Association, a group of Settlers interested in developing the area as a possible new colony and later state.  As to the name Tennessee, South Carolina governor James Glen began spelling the name Tennessee in his correspondence in the 1750's.  Timberlake also used the spelling in his journals.  In 1788, North Carolina created a Tennessee County out of what is now Montgomery County and Robertson County.  By the time the state constitutional convention met in 1796, the modern spelling became official. 

Today, the site of Tanasi lies under the lake with a monument overlooking it.  Part of Chota is also submerged, though the area where the Chota townhouse stood has a monument with carvings denoting the seven Cherokee clans and the Nation as a whole.