A skirmish between a colonial militia and Cherokee warriors was waged in Western North Carolina in 1776. But where exactly the battle was fought is a matter for debate.
Tensions had been rising between colonial settlers and Cherokee people in the Great Smoky Mountains for a while before Col. Andrew Williamson raised a militia to invade the land west of the Blue Ridge escarpment.
Over the course of almost a century prior to the American revolution, the Cherokee had maintained a strong, trade-based relationship with the British government. As revolutionary sentiments rose from a simmer to a boil, that relationship grew into a military alliance. All the while, colonists were increasingly moving west of the escarpment into the “frontier,” territory that was supposed to be off limits.
Attacks against settlers encroaching on Cherokee land became more frequent, and the colonial government grew concerned. Among the charges in the Declaration of Independence was that King George III “excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
This sentiment was echoed in a letter from John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, to the North Carolina Council on Safety.
“The Congress having received information from the State of North Carolina that the Cherokee have committed hostilities against the inhabitants thereof, and that the President of that State had thought proper to carry the war immediately into the heart of the enemy’s country,” Hancock wrote. “I am directed by the Congress to inform you of their request, that you will afford all necessary assistance to, and cooperate with the State of South Carolina in carrying on with vigor the intended expedition.”
Leading the expeditionary force in North Carolina was Brig. Gen. Griffith Rutherford, the namesake of the Rutherford Trace, which his band of almost 3,000 militiamen used to move through Cherokee territory, burning villages as they went. Williamson headed up the South Carolina force. After waging a campaign of terror through that colony toward the end of the summer of 1776, he moved north, expecting to rendezvous with Rutherford at Nikwasi, near present-day Franklin. The plan was for the combined force to march toward the Valley River to the west, but Rutherford had left before Williamson even arrived.
The colonel and his militia took off on their own, using Cherokee trails to traverse the rugged terrain. According to the book “A Demand of Blood: The Cherokee War of 1776” by Nadia Dean, diary accounts from militiamen describe that on Sept. 19, they entered a long valley surrounded by mountains. The militiamen had seen the signs of Cherokee warriors in the area, so they knew they may be walking into an ambush. They tightened ranks, riding two-by-two as the valley narrowed.
Musket balls rained down from both sides of the ravine. Warriors clad in loincloths and covered in red paint rushed down to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the vanguard. Militiamen found cover where they could and returned fire with their own weapons, including swivel guns — small cannons mounted on the backs of horses. Smoke filled the ravine, making the Cherokee warriors seem ghostly amid the sounds of gunfire and war whoops echoing off the surrounding mountains.
The militiamen, with their superior numbers and weaponry, tried to push up the sides of the ravine to shore up the front line. According to Dean, after about an hour and 45 minutes, the battle fizzled out. The warriors, initially successful in their ambush, likely ran out of ammunition. They retreated to higher ground, leaving confused militiamen scrambling to regain their bearings and assess the damage.
Records vary on how many were dead and wounded on each side, but estimates are as high as 13 militia dead and 18 wounded to four Cherokee warriors killed.
The site of the battle along Macon County’s Wayah Creek described in Dean’s book is now identified with a historical marker noting the “Battle of the Black Hole.” However, different theories regarding the location are emerging, begging the question, where did that fateful skirmish play out?
The prevailing narrative
I got the idea for this story as we considered what kind of America 250 coverage we wanted in The Smoky Mountain News. I thought about doing something on the Rutherford Expedition. I came across some articles about The Battle of Coweecho River, also known as the Battle of the Black Hole or the Battle of Dark Hollow. That felt like a good bet. I set to work a week before deadline thinking the assignment would be straightforward, but I had no clue what awaited me.
My first stop was the Waynesville home of Joe Sam Queen, a former state senator and representative, who has long been an advocate for preserving the region’s cultural heritage. He’s also a history buff and a member of the Sons of the American Revolution whose family in the region goes all the way back to that era.
Queen poured us some coffee and ushered me into his dining room, where a long hardwood table was covered with piles of pamphlets, photos, documents and brochures tied to Revolutionary War history. Along one side of the table were two easels he’s using in a future presentation on the American Revolution in North Carolina.
The loquacious statesman and I spoke for two hours, during which he laid out his interpretation of the battle, which largely mirrors the narrative Dean set out in her book. We also spoke about the impetus of the Rutherford Expedition and the long-term ramifications of militia incursion into Cherokee territory on the direction of the revolution.
Alongside Wayah Road, just up the valley from the Lyndon B. Johnson Job Corps camp in Macon County, is the sign marking the site of the Battle of the Black Hole . It features the headline “Cherokee defeat.” The Kate and Joe Sam Queen Family Foundation owns 12.84 acres nearby, land Queen told The Smoky Mountain News was soon to be developed.
“We have a very strong interest in finding and preserving that battlefield, and we want to work with local, state and national authorities,” he said.
Queen noted that the weekend before the 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Black Hole, there will be a commemoration hosted by the Sons of the American Revolution, including a reenactment.
Dean and Queen have both brought in archeological teams to preform surveys, but no discoveries have been made.
I walked the stretch Wayah Road in pursuit of something that looked like the dark woods where all that death had occurred 250 years ago. The prevailing theory is that Col. Williamson’s men marched along the creek into the valley, which narrows to the west. The Cherokee and their loyalist allies allegedly executed their ambush in one of the tightest areas, and the fighting spilled back through the ranks to the east toward the current Job Corps site.
As I walked through the fields along the creek, avoiding a few backyards and a couple of large rat snakes, I put myself into the militiamen’s boots, trying to see what they saw. Where the creek winds back toward Wayah Road is a narrow ravine that seems to match the spot Dean described in her book. There sits the marker for the Battle of the Black Hole.
The Swain County theory
When I began working on this story, SMN owner and Publisher Scott McLeod recommended I speak with John deVille, the executive director of the Macon County Historical Society and Museum. I saw deVille the next Monday night, June 22, at a Fontana Regional Library Meeting. He sat next to me, so I mentioned my interest in the battle. He said I need to speak with his friend, Donnie Seagle.
“That battle may not have even been in Macon County,” he said. “It may have been in Swain County.”
Had I been paying attention instead of anxiously waiting for the FRL meeting to start, I would have done what any sensible journalist would consider and asked a follow-up question. Something along the lines of “What?” probably would have worked. I messaged him that night as soon as I got home, and we set up a meeting for that Thursday at the museum. There, he introduced me to Seagle, a wiry mountain man with a handlebar mustache and a dry sense of humor.
The three of us talked about the battle in general terms before nailing down on the heart of the matter. Seagle, 76, has family going back generations in the mountains and has long had an appreciation for local history. The notion that the Battle of the Black Hole may have occurred in Swain County arrived to him as conjecture. A woman told him that when she was growing up and would go hiking with her father in Swain County, he would remind her at a certain point that they were standing where The Battle of the Black Hole was fought.
As Seagle began to accumulate primary and secondary sources, he felt like the rumored battle site matched the accounts he’d found, since the ravine is steeper and narrower than what’s seen at Wayah Creek.
Seagle put together a binder, each document neatly separated by dividers. Much of the evidence that supports his theory was gathered by a man around 1873, at the behest of a historian in Wisconsin who was researching the greater history of an officer involved in the campaign. The mileage documented in the militia’s logs was used to determine the distance it traveled once it entered North Carolina at Rabun gap. That mileage about lines up with both the Wayah Creek and Swain County sites.
Where Queen and Dean were unable to find evidence of the battle at Wayah Creek, Seagle said he went down to his spot with a metal detector, and it pinged all over the ravine. He didn’t want to dig without the right tools and archeological expertise, so the area remains undisturbed.
I told Seagle I’d be interested in seeing his site. He warned me it’d be a tough hike, and I thanked myself for wearing hiking pants and boots that day. Under the condition I don’t make the spot public, he showed me a map and offered precise directions to the top of the ravine from which he argues Cherokee warriors launched their ambush. I should stop at the top of the ravine, he cautioned, since going all the way down could be treacherous.
“They’ll have to bring a helicopter from Fort Bragg to get you,” he said with a slight smile.
The hike was serious. It was hot as hell and too humid for the devil himself. Although I got some extra water and a Snickers bar for good measure, I didn’t have my usual daypack with emergency supplies. I made my way down through the dense brush and woods. Because there wasn’t a well-trodden trail, I was nervous about snakes in some of the tall grass. Off my game, the noise of a heavier animal 50 feet up the mountain jarred me. Deer? Bear. Predator? I summoned all the bass I could muster and shouted “hello” into the darkness, and whatever it was went on its way low and heavy up the mountain.
At the top of the ravine, I put myself in the shoes of a warrior watching the column of militiamen approaching. It may have been recency bias from having just talked to deVille and Seagle, a sort of placebo effect, but I could sense it. A vibe. It felt like the perfect spot for an ambush.
I later came to realize the real threat during my hike was tiny but ubiquitous. As I drove back to Haywood County from Macon, I noticed no fewer than 30 ticks crawling on my clothes. Fortunately, my wife was able to remove the half-dozen embedded in my legs and abdomen with surgical precision despite a somewhat uncooperative patient.
Hunter S. Thompson be damned. Real Gonzo Journalism is practiced in the bush.
The Nantahala woman
In my feverish attempt to paint a full picture of the battle ahead of a mockingly tight deadline, I’d reached out to archeologist Brett Riggs before I even spoke with DeVille and Seagle. Riggs is an archeology professor and researcher at Western Carolina University well known for his work with and advocacy for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
I’d been told Riggs can be hard to reach since he’s out in the field a lot. When I talked to him, he was working at a site in the mountains where Rutherford and his men had camped while torching Cherokee towns up and down the Little Tennessee River. I asked him what he thought of Queen’s and Seagle’s differing theories. They were both wrong, he opined.
Riggs proposed a third location in a ravine in the upper Nantahala River Valley.
According to the diary of a militiaman present for the Battle of the Black Hole, shortly after the fight, as they were marching, a couple of men shot and wounded a Cherokee woman. The militiamen killed the wounded woman, an act of mercy according to the diary. Riggs said that woman was painted like a man — like a Cherokee warrior. He added that around 1851, a traveler documented that a Cherokee man recalled that his mother was killed in the fight. At that time, the Cherokee man said they’d lived in Nantahala.
“Now, that’s not to say that that’s necessarily exactly where they were from, but it points up to there,” Riggs said.
While Riggs isn’t certain his theory is correct, he feels confident that neither the Wayah Creek nor Swain County spots are likely where the Battle of the Black Hole took place, based on his reading of topographic descriptions in primary sources. He specifically said the rugged Swain County site doesn’t make sense, arguing that the militia wouldn’t have used that route to get to the Valley River.
“That’s not a place you would go to cross the mountains,” he said. “The goal of those troops was to get across into the Valley River [area], so it’s like, where are your usual suspects?”
But that doesn’t mean that Seagle’s ping-happy metal detector was malfunctioning. Based other accounts, Riggs believes there was another skirmish in that spot that has become confused through lore to be the Battle of the Black Hole. That fight, whatever it may have been, could even date back to the fraught Montgomery or Grant expeditions of the early 1760s.
“This stuff was going on constantly,” Riggs said. “Just because somebody has indicated there’s a fight somewhere doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the Black Hole.”
“If they don’t show up in the Euro-American accounts, we don’t know anything about them,” he added. “But they might show up in some Cherokee tradition.”
In search of truth
Many of those interviewed for this story were enthralled by the prospect of uncovering the truth of the Battle of the Black Hole, but they were also frustrated by the lack of concrete information to clue them into the right spot.
“Why do we not know anything about this battle? It’s because the victor writes the history, and we didn’t exactly win this battle,” Queen said. “They gave us a first-class black eye.”
Riggs said that identifying the spot once they come upon it would be relatively easy. There should still be thousands of lead rounds embedded deep in the soil, and ground-penetrating radar can indicate the spot where the dead militiamen were buried, apparently in a swampy area somewhere near the site of the battle, according to one militiaman’s diary.
However, Dean, the author of “A Demand of Blood,” told SMN that the site could have been developed, and the mass grave may have already been destroyed.
“All up and down Wayah Road … there are a bunch of cabins built in the 1960s, and they had a bunch of fill dirt,” she said. “And the Job Corps site had previously been a government site built before laws were in place to report the discovery of graves.”
Riggs lamented that this may be the fate for some sensitive archeological sites across the region as homes spring up all over the mountains.
“This place is becoming more and more attractive for development, and that’s how [these sites] are lost; that’s how they’re destroyed,” he said.
The question remains, will the site ever be confirmed?
Right now, “it’s lore encrusted on lore encrusted on lore,” deVille told me.
Dean spent eight years working on her book before its publication in 2012, poring over primary sources and learning from respected Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians historian Lamar Marshall. To think that the Battle of the Black Hole played out in a different spot could be a tough truth to confront, but she said she would happy just to know for sure. Although Seagle’s opinion differs from what’s in her book, Dean said that when she met the man about a year ago, she respected the work he’d put into researching the battle.
“He had worked on it beyond what I did,” she said.
“I’m happy someone has taken enough interest to go further with it,” she added.
While Dean and Queen, Seagle and Riggs have differing opinions on the site of the battle — opinions they all feel strongly about — there is one thing that binds them. It’s the thing that drives many historians. There is value in uncovering something nobody else has found before, but there’s even more value in simply knowing the truth.
Seagle put it concisely.
“I just would like to see it where it’s supposed to be.”