There’s talk in Cherokee of making the chief of police’s job an elected position following a resolution introduced by Travis Smith, a Birdtown resident who’s also a candidate for Tribal Council.

By Wil Shelton • SMN intern

Visitors of the Qualla Boundary now have the opportunity to experience Cherokee culture in a new, interactive way. 

The Cherokee Friends, a program through the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, funded by the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, aims to offer visitors a taste of Cherokee culture, as well as promote various sights around the community.

A riverside petroleum leak in Cherokee has had cleanup crews scrambling since contamination was first discovered in April — and feeling flummoxed the further they’ve probed into the leak’s potential cause.

In Cherokee, alcohol could soon be available in more places than just Harrah’s Cherokee Casino following Gov. Pat McCrory’s signature on a 12-page alcohol omnibus bill. 

As results poured in from the Primary Election for an open chief’s seat, Patrick Lambert’s campaign came out a clear winner, taking 1,751 of 2,964 votes in the unofficial tally — 59.1 percent in a spread of five candidates.

A group of Cherokee people angry over Tribal Council’s decision last fall to give itself a 15 percent pay raise and back pay is planning to file a lawsuit against its members this month.

When Michael Bradley first picked up a fly rod in 2011, he wasn’t looking for anything more than a relaxing pastime. He’d tried fly fishing once before, as an 11-year-old kid, but “didn’t do so good at it.” At age 20, he thought things might be different if he gave it another try. 

He was right. 

Bradley Letts will have to keep his day job, but the Superior Court Judge will soon begin serving as a temporary judge for the Cherokee Supreme Court. 

William Holland Thomas, a self-made, prominent businessman, a revered chief in the Cherokee tribe, a politician and a colonel in the Confederate Army, spent the final 20 years of his life fighting mental illness. He passed those years, as he put it, “in a mad man’s cell.” No diagnosis of his condition exists, though biographers E. Stanley Godbold and Mattie U. Russell contend that Thomas was possibly suffering the tertiary state of syphilis, which causes erratic behavior and bouts of insanity.

Not all the Eastern Cherokee supported the Confederacy. Several served with the Union army during the Civil War and were ostracized by the Confederate Cherokees after hostilities ceased. Some evidence exists that one of these Union soldiers brought smallpox back to the small band of Cherokees who survived the war, with devastating results.