Yonaguska

Yonaguska, (1759–1839), who was known as Drowning Bear (the English meaning of his name), was a leader among the Cherokee of the Lower Towns of North Carolina. As a result of a vision, in 1819 he banished liquor from his people's territory.

During the Indian Removal of the late 1830s, he was the only chief who remained in the hills to rebuild the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, joined by others who had escaped or eluded the United States soldiers. Before that time, he had adopted William Holland Thomas as his son; the fatherless European-American youth was working at the trading post and had learned Cherokee. Yonaguska taught him Cherokee ways and, after Thomas became an attorney, he represented the tribe in negotiations with the federal government. Yonaguska selected Thomas as his successor; he was the only white man ever to become a chief of a Cherokee band. Thomas bought land and established a Cherokee reserve for the tribe's use at what is now the Qualla Boundary, the territory of the federally recognized tribe in North Carolina.

During his life, Yonaguska was a reformer and a prophet; he was a leader who recognized the destructive power of the white man’s liquor and the settlers' insatiable greed for Cherokee lands.

Yonaguska was born about 1759 in the Cherokee Lower Towns of present-day North Carolina and Georgia. According to the Cherokee matrilineal system of inheritance and descent, he was considered born into his Cherokee mother's clan, where he gained his status. As a boy of 12, Yonaguska had a vision that the European Americans threatened the Cherokee way of life, but people did not pay attention when he spoke of it. At age 17, he witnessed widespread destruction by Gen. Griffith Rutherford and his North Carolina militia, who in 1776 burned 36 Cherokee towns. The Cherokee had been allied with the British, and the colonials were trying to discourage them from acting in the coming revolution.

Yonaguska was described as a strikingly handsome man, strongly built, and standing 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m). He suffered from becoming addicted to alcohol as a young man. He and his wife adopted as their son William Holland Thomas, a fatherless European-American youth who worked at the trading post at Qualla Town and learned the Cherokee language. Thomas learned many Cherokee ways.

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