Everywhere one goes in Western North Carolina, there are secluded places reputedly used as hideaways by the Cherokees seeking refuge from the U.S. Army during the removal era. Most of these legends arise from mere fancy, oft-told tales connected to dank holes in the ground.

Caves were not, in fact, utilized to any great extend by the Cherokees as hideaway shelters; instead, they preferred, when possible, to take refuge beneath overhanging rock shelters that they knew from centuries of upland hunting. They wanted a dry, secluded site that offered good water and warming sunlight, especially during the fall and winter of 1838, when most of them took to the backcountry rather than allowing themselves to be rounded up for deportation to northeastern Oklahoma.

The complex of so-called Indian Caves and an adjacent rock shelter in the Nantahala Gorge are impressive sites that met those criteria. But these might not have been used because of their proximity to Fort Lindsay, which was situated a few miles to the east at the mouth of the Nantahala River.

Tsali’s Rock on the Left Fork of Deep Creek in the high Smokies under Clingman’s Dome is perhaps the most famous shelter. Circumstantial evidence indicates that it probably was the actual spot where Tsali, the Cherokee martyr, was captured in November 1838, several days before his execution near present day Bryson City. But as a shelter it’s not very impressive, consisting of an overhanging rock maybe 15-feet high that would provide dry quarters for not more than several adults.

One of the impressive sites of this sort in the region is the rock shelter at Rockhouse Knob in the Nantahala Mountains, situated about 10 miles southwest of Franklin near the state line with Georgia. The top of this mountain is covered in thick rhododendron, while its southwestern face consists of an extensive outcrop of granite that forms a vertical wall several hundred yards long and well over 100-feet high in places.

The first portion of the outcrop provides little, if any, shelter. The southern end, however, consists of a portion of the cliff that separated from the main wall long ago (perhaps during the last glacial epoch that reached its apogee about 18,000 years ago) thereby creating a room-like space about 150-feet long, 50-feet wide, and over 100-feet high.

The overhanging cliff keeps out precipitation while allowing afternoon sunlight to strike and warm the granitic interior. One portion of the “room” sits high and dry, while a lower portion contains a spring that provides clean water even in late summer. A round fireplace of stones maintained by hikers and hunters probably sits about where the campfire of the Cherokee refugees was placed.

There can be little doubt that the ancient Cherokees would have known the site and utilized it as one of their upland camps while hunting. It’s too good a spot for them to have missed. And it’s situated near one of the old trails that led from their towns in present north Georgia to their settlements on the upper Nantahala River and on to those on the Valley River and the Peachtree Community near present day Murphy.

Accordingly, the alleged use of Rockhouse Knob during the removal is not farfetched, although absolute documentation is perhaps impossible. The southern portion of the Nantahalas was a remote, rugged area that the Indians knew well. It was also a region located away from the network of forts and stockades constructed by the military during the spring of 1838.

In a chapter titled “This Was Indian Country” in her book Views from Valley Front (Winston-Salem NC: John F. Blair, 1986), North Georgia native Beatrice Jefferson Stubbs recounted that the early settlers in Dillard, Georgia, “took pity on the plight of the refugees” and “supplied grain and other necessities over a period of years, or until it was legally safe for the Indians to appear in public.” She also describes a visit to a cave on the flank of Pickens Nose (several miles east of Rockhouse Knob) to which “several Indian families fled and hid.”

The Spring 1989 issue of “Foxfire” magazine contains an article titled “The Cherokee Cave” with photographs of the Rockhouse Knob shelter. The Foxfire School student authors interviewed “Doctor” John M. Brown, an area resident, who was told as a child about the existence of Rockhouse Knob by two older, local woodsmen.

“I was taken to it by great uncle Jim Williams,” Brown recalled. “The story narrates that three Indians occupied the shelter ... during the time that it was was illegal for Cherokee to remain in these mountains. Furthermore, these Indians were thought to be members of Wayah Katoga’s family. The age and sex of the Indians was not revealed to me, or I do not remember the data, if I heard it ... According to local tales and historical documents in North Carolina, early settlers in the Betty’s Creek and Nantahala River area were more friendly toward Indians than they were to the rude soldiers trying to round up the Indians. Certainly, without the help of these local people, the soldiers would not have been able to find the Cherokee Cave or the renegade Indians ... Two findings have been of interest to me and which appear to support the proposition that the occupants of the Rockhouse Knob likely were members of Standing Wolf’s family ... Wayah Katoga and his family were well-known Indians along the Nantahala. Wayah Bald was named for him.”

In Valley So Wild (Knoxille TN: East Tennessee Historical Society, 1975), Alberta and Carson Brewer noted that, “One who did not go west was Wayah Katoga (Standing Wolf). This peaceful old man lived with his wife near Fort Lindsay, at the confluence of the Little Tennessee and the Nantahala.” After being rounded up, “The old man and his family were taken to the big stockade on the Hiwassee River, at Calhoun, Tennessee, where they waited for many weeks with hundreds of other Indians.” According to the Brewers, the officer from Fort Lindsay asked if they would like to return to the mountains and allowed them to escape.

Did the family join the large band of fugitives led by U’Tsala (“The Lichen”) and flee into the high Smokies (U’Tsala’s refuge) as the Brewers assert? Or did they flee to the snug shelter at Rockhouse Knob here in the far Nantahalas and bide their time as local legends maintains?

Whatever the instance, it seems unlikely that this secluded site would have gone unused during that sad period by those Cherokees seeking to remain in their homeland. There is no natural upland shelter in WNC better suited for that sort of extended refuge.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.