Cherokee

The Cherokee, or Tsalagi, spoke an Iroquoian language. Before the eighteenth century they lived in towns along the river valleys of what is now southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, northern Georgia and neighboring states, with hunting grounds reaching into Kentucky. A tradition says they came south from the Great Lakes in ancient times, but later scholars place the origin of Iroquoian in the Appalachians.

The name appears in accounts of the Hernando de Soto expedition of the 1540s. The Cherokee were farmers living in permanent towns, and by the nineteenth century they had adopted many European American practices and created a writing system of their own.