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THE DEVIL'S GANG PLACE
• Chief Young Warrior and his warriors were constantly away from their village, with Dragging Canoe's forces on the borders of Tennessee and North Carolina, fighting the white enemy.
• Then in the early daylight hours in the late spring of 1780, the colonial army came to Sogwiligigagei village.
• Silently they came, in canoes, through the heavy fog that hung over the valley and Sumac River. Like cats stalking through the tall grass, the foot soldiers slipped through the tall canes along the river upon the sleeping village of old men, women and children, and sick persons.
• Sequoyah, a boy of fourteen, and Uhyalug, were night guarding the only trail leading into the settlement from the mountain above. At the same time, they were keeping watch on the village milk cows and horses night grazing on the side of the mountain below them. The boys looked down through the haze and caught a glimpse of the soldiers creeping toward the village. Sequoyah wondered why the pack of tame wolves and dogs failed to charge the enemy, and awaken the people. He could not then know that Choctaw scouts had slipped in during the night, and laid poison meat along the river for the animals, all were dead.
• Sequoyah and Uhyalug gave the distressed turkey cry to the sleeping people, and began shooting at the soldiers. Uhyalug ran to the top of the mountain to beat the drum that had been hidden away in the cave for the purpose of signaling for help from neighbor villages over the mountains.8
• When the first shot was fired, the people came out of ?heir homes - old men and women, shooting and clubbing with guns, knives and hatchets. The younger women ran with the children toward the river and the fleet of canoes, only to be met by the blast of guns from the soldiers who were left guarding their escape route.
• Sequoyah saw his sick father and tiny mother shot down in front of their home, as they came out firing at the soldiers. He saw his three elder sisters running toward the river and the woods, and tall canes along the river, where all young women and children were attempting to escape to their canoes. He crept closer to the village, and was joined by Uhyalug, who informed him that horse soldiers were coming over the mountain trail to the village.
• The boys kept firing at the soldiers until their ball and powder ran out. All they could do then was to watch from a tall bushy pine tree, where they were forced to retreat and wait for help to come from other villages.
• But the help they wished and waited for never came. Soldiers were also destroying the other mountain villages nearby.
• Sequoyah looked down in pain, anger and distress upon the one-way slaughter of his people, unable to help them. The people were fighting with all their Indian skill and strength against the guns and swords of the white and black soldiers. Smoke rose in the village from the hundreds of guns firing. Sequoyah could see and hear the thrust of steel swords into Indian bodies. There was yelling, yelling, yelling of the soldiers, and the screaming of Indian children who managed to escape the gun blast. Mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, brothers and sisters lay about like rocks.
• Hundreds of mounted soldiers arrived over the mountain trail to help in the Cherokee slaughter. Having killed all the old men and women fighters, having shot those who were wounded, to make sure they died, the soldiers began rounding up and dragging the women and children out of the tall canes and woods along Sumac River. These were marched back to the scene of the battle. Women and children who were injured were shot. Sequoyah's eldest sister Guyutse, wounded in the legs, was killed alongside the Sumac River.
• Mounted soldiers, in groups, rode wildly through the planted fields of young corn, cotton, beans, peas and potatoes; swinging their swords, slashing and destroying with the trampling feet of their horses. All Cherokee horses and cattle within the valley were shot. Then the soldiers plundered the smokehouse of hams and other dried meats. They took all fruits and vegetables that were easy to load on horses or in canoes. The communal corn cribs and Cherokee homes were set afire.
• While the women and children watched their homes burn, all around them they saw their dead, and the few soldiers killed lying in their blood. White and black soldiers began their work of collecting Cherokee scalps and privates, throwing them into Cherokee made baskets, and putting some of the women's breasts in their pockets.
• Cherokee children screamed, and the women sang their magic protection idigawesdi, for they knew they would be killed - or worse, taken into slavery.
• In less than four hours from the start of the massacre, every Cherokee man and woman fighter was killed, fields and homes destroyed, and the horses and canoes of the murdering soldiers were packed with cured meats, fruits and vegetables. Soldiers ordered some of the women and children to the Cherokee canoes on the Sumac River, where they were taken into slavery. Home soldiers led the way, others behind and on each side of the remaining women and children, marched them out of the valley, over the mountain trail, using them for a shield and protection to reach the white settlement in South Carolina.
• After the soldiers marched out of Sogwiligigagei valley, Sequoyah and Uhyalug descended to the ground, and ran to their burning village to see if some of those shot were still alive. What greeted their eyes was one of butchery - Cherokees with their heads cut off, scalped heads, private parts cut off, and their bodies slashed open. Others had been thrown into burning homes.
• Finding none of their people alive, the boys ran, following the horse soldiers, and giving the eagle distress call for help to those who might hear in the other villages. Help never came.
• The boys followed the horse soldiers and their people to the white settlement in South Carolina. In no way could they get close enough to the women and children to help them escape. They had only rocks in their hands for weapons.
• Sequoyah and Uhyalug returned to their nation, and walked through the mountains to Dragging Canoe's newly built village on Crawfish Creek, a tributary of the Big Tennessee River, near what is today Chattanooga.
• Groups of volunteer workers from Dragging Canoe's village went to the valley of Sogwiligigagei, and buried the dead. The village was never rebuilt.

Traveller Bird. Tell Them They Lie: The Sequoyah Myth. Westernlore Publishers, 1971.

The Snake Doctor