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- Tsali (Cherokee: ᏣᎵ), originally of Coosawattee Town (Kusawatiyi), was a noted leader of the Cherokee during two different periods of the history of the tribe. As a young man, he followed the Chickamauga Cherokee war chief, Dragging Canoe, from the time the latter migrated southwest during the Cherokee–American wars. In 1812 he became known as a prophet, urging the Cherokee to ally with the Shawnee Tecumseh in war against the Americans. Later, during the 1830s roundup of Cherokee for Indian Removal, Tsali, his wife and brother, his three sons and their families were taken by surprise and marched at bayonet point toward the Indian Agency on the Hiwasee River. When Tsali's wife paused to care for the needs of her baby, one of the guards whipped her and prodded her with his bayonet, to force her on her way. According to a secondhand account by Wasidana, Tsali's son, the mother and baby were forced onto horseback and, in the process, "she got her foot hung in the stirrup. Then her baby dropped. It went that way, out yonder, and bust the head. And it died right then." In response, a surprise attack was made on the soldiers, one guard was killed and the rest wounded or subdued. Tsali and his relatives fled to the mountains and hid out in a cave in the Smoky Mountains. His successful evasion was reported to the other Indians by grapevine and soon the mountain Cherokees by dozens, then by hundreds, joined him in the hideout, living off roots and berries on the border of starvation. General Scott was baffled by the situation. He had not the troops to track down Indians in that impervious and secret region. Nor was he certain that he wanted to. But if Tsali's freedom went unchallenged, a fateful example would be set for other Cherokees. Scott enlisted the services of William Holland Thomas, a white attorney who had been adopted into the tribe in his youth and would later become its chief. He also represented the tribe in negotiations with the federal government regarding the removals. Thomas was given a message to the leader of the fugitives. If Tsali and his family would surrender themselves to military justice, the rest of the Cherokees in the mountains could remain free. He and his brother and sons came down from the mountains and gave themselves up. Tsali's youngest boy Wasidana was spared; the others were executed. According to Wasidana, they were shot by a firing squad of Cherokee prisoners, compelled to the act as a means of impressing on the Indians the hopelessness of their position. Tsali's martyrdom, however, marked not a hopeless end but a beginning. The three hundred fugitives remaining free became the forebears of some fourteen thousand registered members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians living today, legatees of the once-proudest Nation in Native American Indian history. And Tsali's story survives close to the scene of its original enactment, in the annual presentation of a Cherokee drama entitled Unto These Hills. (en)
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- Tsali (Cherokee: ᏣᎵ), originally of Coosawattee Town (Kusawatiyi), was a noted leader of the Cherokee during two different periods of the history of the tribe. As a young man, he followed the Chickamauga Cherokee war chief, Dragging Canoe, from the time the latter migrated southwest during the Cherokee–American wars. In 1812 he became known as a prophet, urging the Cherokee to ally with the Shawnee Tecumseh in war against the Americans. (en)
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