This is the tenth and final article in a series about travel and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
In a Cherokee town overlooking the Little Tennessee River, a white woman is bound to a stake, surrounded by kindling.
At 50, Lydia Bean is as tough as shoe leather, having given birth to the last of her children in a lean-to on the Appalachian frontier. But on this day, if we are to believe historical accounts, she had seen a fellow captive, a teenage boy, burned to death, and she is choking on her fear.
Torture served a purpose for the Cherokee. It was a way of replacing their own dead, restoring a cosmic balance. But in 1776, it had another, more strategic function. It sent a message to the waves of settlers who were spilling over the mountains and torching Cherokee villages in violation of the treaties solemnly negotiated with the British. If the treaties didn’t stop them, maybe fear would.
Lydia is waiting to die, when from within the clamor of her Cherokee captors comes the voice of a woman. This is Nanyehi, who had taken the English name Nancy Ward after her second marriage, to a white trader. She is 39, straight-backed and a grandmother, like Lydia.
And she clearly commands respect, because Lydia’s captors — young men, warriors — obey her. They step aside, and let Nancy lead Lydia, limping and bloody, away.
This summer, as people in East Tennessee celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, they will retell the story of Nancy Ward, a Cherokee leader who intervened to save the lives of white settlers. In its retellings, her story has taken on a mythic character. She is the “Pocahontas of Tennessee,” a “high priestess and prophetess,” a “princess.”
What I found on a visit to the region was something harder and bloodier. There were no regular British troops here in 1776, no battles between red and blue. Instead, self-organized militias were fighting the Cherokees, clearing the land for a tidal wave of white settlers.
For decades, the Cherokee had managed to hold onto their territory by playing colonial powers against one another, securing a commitment from King George III that the land west of the Appalachians was theirs. The Revolution swept that guarantee away. Thousands of settlers were preparing to surge west, and younger Cherokee leaders led by Dragging Canoe, Nancy’s cousin, were preparing for all-out war.
When Nancy made her desperate attempts to avert that conflict, it opened a divide that continues 250 years later. When I asked about her in Cherokee, N.C., a community that celebrates her cousin’s campaign of resistance, people responded with a single word: traitor.
Ghost Chasing
To get to Chota, where Nancy was born, you turn off the highway about 35 miles southwest of Knoxville, Tenn., and onto a two-lane road that twists around the tributaries of the Little Tennessee River. Twelve miles in, the way narrows to the width of a car. From there you must continue by foot.
When I visited, it was morning, and dew was still on the grass. I followed a dirt path into the woods, which smelled sweet, like water and earth. All around there was birdsong. I had to duck, at one point, under a hammock of vines, and then found myself in a glade at the foot of a large hickory tree. Just beyond that was Chota.
To be clear: Chota is gone. American militias burned it to the ground in the 1780s. Then, in 1979, the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the river, submerging a string of ancient Cherokee villages at the bottom of a lake.
As for the people, they are gone, too. They tried to stay after Chota was razed, dispersing into valleys and foothills. But then, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act and around 16,000 Cherokee were forced to leave their homes, some at gunpoint, and relocate to Oklahoma.
So my visit to the site was ghost-chasing. Once, a whole civilization had radiated from the spot where I stood, a 60-foot circle marking the location of Chota’s council house. It would have been in a place like this, amid a fever of newly spilled blood, that she interceded to save the life of Lydia Bean.
My guide that morning was Becky Hobbs, 76, a country singer-songwriter who is Nancy’s fifth-great-granddaughter. Becky, who grew up in Bartlesville, Okla., is not a melancholy character; her catalog includes titles like “A Bible and a Sixpack” and “Kiss My Ashes.”
On the subject of Cherokee history, however, Becky is dead serious. Her maternal grandmother signaled her steely hatred of Andrew Jackson by refusing to touch $20 bills. Becky parlayed this history into a honky-tonk anthem, “I’ll Take Two Tens (And You Can Keep the Twenty).” Mostly, though, her focus has been “Nanyehi — the Story of Nancy Ward,” a musical based on her ancestor’s life.
The Heroic Version
Becky was taught the heroic version. The legend is that a teenage Nanyehi accompanied her husband into battle against the Creeks; she lay beside him chewing his lead bullets so that they would inflict more damage, and then picked up his rifle when he was killed.
The tribal nation gave her the status of Beloved Woman, which included seats on councils that oversaw military strategy and civil order, and the authority to decide the fates of captives. She Anglicized her name after her second marriage; both her daughters married white men. By the time of the Revolution, she had feet in both worlds.
This may help explain why she tried so hard to keep the peace. She is best known for speaking eloquently at peace talks, startling colonial officials who were not used to encountering women in positions of power. Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt mention her in their writings.
“You know that women are always looked upon as nothing, but we are your mothers; you are our sons,” she told U.S. treaty commissioners. “Our cry is all for peace; let it continue. This peace must last forever. Let your women’s sons be ours; let our sons be yours. Let your women hear our words.”
What many Cherokee judge her for is something else: In 1776, she is said to have dispatched white traders to warn settlers that her cousin Tsiyu Gansini, or Dragging Canoe, was preparing a major offensive. The attack failed, and a raiding party returned with two captives. One was a boy, Samuel Moore, who was killed; Nancy interceded to save the second, Lydia Bean.
The two women lived together in Chota for two months or two years, depending on who is telling the story. White historians would cast it as a cultural watershed; Lydia, it is said, taught Nancy how to raise dairy cows and weave on a loom, technologies that would ripple through Cherokee communities.
Then, for reasons we can only guess at, Nancy asked her son and brother to deliver Lydia safely back to her husband. Lydia would live another 12 years.
The Remains of Chota
As we drifted around the remains of Chota, I was surprised by how moved I felt. My mind had been full of hectic violence — the burning corn fields, the torture of captives. But the place was peaceful, ringed by flowering mimosa trees. It was so quiet that you could hear the sound of water lapping at the lake’s edge, like someone tapping a knife on a wine glass.
Only one other site has been conclusively linked with Nancy — her grave, 50 miles southwest of Chota. So we headed down the highway, past a landscape of Waffle Houses and tiny Baptist churches. River rafting drives the economy here, and the roadside is punctuated by billboards showing ecstatic white people in life jackets.
For Nancy, the years after independence were a train of disappointments. In 1819, she signed up for an offer that the federal government extended to Cherokees who wished to stay near their ancestral land: Upon taking U.S. citizenship, each head of household would receive a “life estate” of one square mile. Nancy registered for a parcel of land beside a crystalline brook called Mouse Creek.
But she — like more than 300 Cherokees who tried to take this offer — found it virtually impossible to fend off white squatters. Some fled arson or violence. In Nancy’s case, her land was simply snatched away: One day, records show, she returned to her cabin and a white man named Cookson had moved in. When her heirs appealed to the federal government for compensation, it ruled that she was not entitled to anything, because she had “voluntarily abandoned” the land.
Around her 80th birthday, she moved down to Benton, which was still Cherokee land. At the end of her life, she is said to have had a vision of a row of Cherokee marching west, with white soldiers behind them. Her great-grandson claimed that, as she died, a light rose from her body and took the shape of a bird. It fluttered around the ceiling, and then flew out the door in the direction of Chota.
A Pilgrimage Site
In the middle of the afternoon, we arrived at Nancy’s grave, a stone monument at the foot of a spreading cedar tree. It is a lonely spot; she is buried beside her brother and son, but a great distance from Chota, or other family. Pilgrims have left piles of tokens, stones and shells and roses.
The site was marked in 1923, by a Chattanooga chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which called her the “Princess and Prophetess of the Cherokee Nation, the Pocahontas of Tennessee and the constant friend of the American Pioneer.”
One plaque calls her the “always loyal friend of white settlers.” Another, erected before the 250th anniversary of independence, proclaims her a “Revolutionary War Patriot” who “fought valiantly to found a new nation.”
Tributes have also been placed by her descendants, who are concentrated near Tahlequah, Okla., the capital of the Cherokee Nation, and are estimated to number around 40,000. Among them is Becky, whose musical reimagines it all — the treaties, the massacres, the Great Removal — in exuberant song-and-dance numbers. “Nanyehi” has been produced 13 times, most often in Oklahoma.
It was not until she explored bringing her work to the territory of the Eastern Band, a federally recognized tribe descended from Cherokee who avoided removal, that Becky realized that not everyone shared her rosy view of Nancy.
“All of a sudden, I felt this coldness,” she said. She has since heard the critique over and over — “‘You know, she warned the white settlers that Dragging Canoe was going to attack,’ blah blah blah.”
Becky has little patience for this view. The way she sees it, Nancy and her cousin were seeking the same thing: Some way for the Cherokee people to survive. The difference between them, she said, is that Nancy was cleareyed enough to realize that fighting the settlers was futile.
“See, that really riles me up,” she said. “Pardon my language. But she was not a traitor.” As recently as this summer, at a ceremony marking the Great Removal, she marched over to a “mean little Eastern Band woman muttering to herself,” and asked, “Why are you so hateful to me?” The woman finally answered, “I am a fan of Dragging Canoe.”
Out of curiosity, I drove over the Great Smoky Mountains into Cherokee, N.C. where Dragging Canoe’s image can be found on T-shirts and tattoos and murals, an icon of resistance on par with Crazy Horse or Che Guevara.
Kathi Littlejohn, a storyteller and a member of the Eastern Band, said she had been mystified by Nancy’s growing following: the chartered buses, the re-enactors in colonial garb firing off muskets.
“I just don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t want to say they worship her, but it’s sort of close.” Nancy deserves credit for advocating peace, Kathi said, but historians “kind of gloss over the part where she warned the American settlers and they walked into an ambush and quite a few people were killed.”
That was one of the friendlier responses. When I inquired at a service station in Ducktown, Tenn., I was directed to a young man with tattoos and a Mohawk, who was said to have a command of tribal history. When I mentioned her name, his face darkened. “I’m not going there,” he said, and stalked out.
The Forgotten Power of Women
Historians I approached resisted both narratives, the Pocahontas one and the traitor one.
For one thing, the Cherokees vested women with sweeping authority over the treatment of captives, over land cessions and over the decision to go to war. In 1776, many Cherokee women resisted the drive to war, said Julie Reed, an associate professor of history and anthropology at the University of Tulsa.
That authority would fade after independence, she added. “Cherokee people today have forgotten the power of women,” she said. “She wasn’t acting as a traitor, she was acting as a Cherokee woman with matrilineal power.”
Also, Nancy was hardly alone in building a strategic alliance with white people. Dragging Canoe was receiving muskets and ammunition from Britain, which hoped the Cherokee would serve as a firewall against settler expansion.
“She is racing to prevent this huge collision that she can see is about to happen,” said Stuart Marshall, an ethnohistorian at Virginia Tech. “She is certainly sticking her neck out at that moment. It’s a huge risk for her to do so.”
Stuart has also studied the seizure of Nancy’s land on Mouse Creek, and thinks that, by the end of her life, her feelings toward her white neighbors would have hardened. “She would have felt betrayed, even by the families like the Beans, whom she had helped,” he said.
What Didn’t Happen
East Tennessee is full of Lydia Bean’s descendants, so before I left, I decided to put the question to one of them.
I met Maxine Bean Jones, Lydia’s fifth-great-granddaughter, in the Starbucks at the Food City in Ocoee. Maxine, 72, told me her thoughts had always been drawn to Lydia, snatched up by fighters and threatened with a horrifying death.
When Nancy took her in, Maxine imagines, Lydia would have been in a state of shock, mute with terror. It would have taken endless patience — nursing her wounds, keeping her company — for Nancy to make Lydia feel safe, she thinks.
“As long as Nancy was there, she was protected,” she said. “You wonder, did she think, ‘Well, she’s no different from me? She’s a woman?’”
What passed between the two women is lost to history; there are no known accounts, written or oral, from either one. Some historians I spoke to questioned whether the famous rescue happened at all. But Maxine believes that, for a few weeks, Lydia Bean and Nancy Ward broke the pattern of bloodshed.
“That was the glimmer of hope,” she said. She imagined the helpless gratitude of William Bean, Lydia’s husband, at her safe return: “If the Cherokee kept my wife, if they kept her alive and brought her back home, then we owe them a debt of gratitude. We need to get along.”
That version of history didn’t happen. Nancy had been dead for 15 years when the U.S. Army forced Cherokee families from their homes at gunpoint; it is estimated that 4,000 died during the brutal journey west, of disease or pneumonia or hypothermia. Two of Nancy’s great-grandsons, who had advocated for removal, were assassinated by other Cherokee who accused them of selling out their people.
As for Lydia, you cannot say that she was spared. Shortly after her rescue, George, her brother, was killed by Cherokee on a hunting trip. Her elder daughter, Sarah, had to call off her wedding because of a Cherokee attack. A few years after that, her youngest daughter, Jane, then 33, had moved her loom outside her cabin in Bean Station. Jane was weaving in the open air, under a willow tree, when she was killed by a Cherokee arrow.
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2026.
