It’s May 7, 1865, and the Confederate troops who have surrounded the smaller Union force in Waynesville, North Carolina, descend from the hills to accept the surrender of the invaders. Most conspicuous among the Confederates are 20 tall Oconaluftee Cherokee warriors decked out in war paint and carrying tomahawks. At their center of the group, bare-chested and in similar regalia, is their commander, William Thomas, a small man barely five feet tall, known to the Cherokee as Wil-Usdi, or Little Will.
Thomas is the only white man ever chosen as chief of the Eastern band of the Cherokee.
After two days of palaver, during which an increasingly unbalanced Thomas makes repeated threats of scalping the Yankee troops, news arrives that the other Confederate forces in the state have followed the example of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and given up the fight. This last Southern force east of the Mississippi, including Thomas’s Legion, then surrender as well.
William Holland Thomas, known as Wil-Usdi to his Cherokee brethren, was the only white chief in the history of the Cherokee people. (Public Domain)
Thomas lived another 23 years, but both his wealth and his sanity were gone. He spent those years in and out of mental institutions, a man ravaged by the wreckage of war and disease, estranged by madness from his beloved younger wife and his equally beloved Cherokee. Though he is little known today outside of North Carolina, this man’s story is extraordinary.
Early Life
William Holland Thomas (1805–1893) owed a good part of his character to his mother, Temperance Calvert Thomas (1774–1874), who in 1805 had trekked with her husband into the mountain wilderness. Following the drowning death of her husband before Thomas was born, Temperance elected to remain in the Smokies near present-day Waynesville, schooling her son in reading and Scripture, and giving him the elements of a moral code that would endure throughout his struggles and travails.
In 1817, though still a boy, Thomas made a decision that would forever change his life. He left home and went to work at a nearby trading post patronized chiefly by the neighboring Cherokee. Thomas soon became fluent in their language. When the post closed, he received as part of his payment a set of law books, studied them, and eventually became a legal advocate for the Cherokee. After opening his own trading post, followed by more of them, he brought his mother to live in his house, began purchasing land, and even though still a young man, became wealthy, owning tens of thousands of acres in the Western North Carolina mountains.
His Two Great Loves
"Two Indians and a White Man in a Canoe," circa 1811– 1813, by Pavel Petrovich Svinin. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. (Public Domain)
Yet Thomas’s greatest passion was not financial gain, but the welfare of the Cherokee. He brought the law to their side in their legal wranglings with the federal government and traveled frequently to Washington to lobby on their behalf before Congress. He fought for their right to remain in their tribal homeland rather than joining the forced march of other Native Americans to Oklahoma and for the payments due them from treaties made with the United States. He spent his own money helping them acquire the land that became known as the Qualla Boundary, which is today owned by the Cherokee and held in trust by the U.S. government.
Early on, Thomas’s hard work, honesty, and clear affection for the Cherokee had brought him to the attention of their chief, Yonaguska, who mentored him, taught him his people’s customs, and then adopted him, giving him the name Wil-Usdi. In 1838, while Thomas was once again in Washington working on behalf of the Cherokee, the dying Yonaguska called a council and designated Thomas as the chief of the Oconaluftee Cherokee, an astounding development but one which was wise, considering Thomas’s passionate efforts on behalf of the tribe and his knowledge of the law.
Sarah Love (1832–1877) was the granddaughter of Waynesville’s founder, Col. Robert Love. Though Thomas had known her for years—he was good friends with her father—something magical must have transpired between them when Sarah was in her early 20s. Despite the difference in their ages—Thomas was 52 at the time—the two married in 1857, causing a Raleigh, North Carolina newspaper to comment on Thomas’s departure from his long bachelorhood, “There is no such word as ‘fail’ in the vocabulary of the patient and the persevering.”
The love between husband and wife appeared genuine and rooted in mutual admiration and respect. Unfortunately, events soon took their toll on these affections. From surviving letters, we sense Thomas’s frustration caused by his long absences from home—he was in Washington advocating for the Cherokee when his first son was born—and then came the Civil War.
The couple did manage to produce two sons and a daughter, and might have found comfort in each other and in their children after the war’s devastating effects, but madness overtook Thomas. The loyal Sarah kept a promise she had once made to him, that she would stand by him and love him even if “fortune and all the world beside desert him.” It was Thomas whose mind and spirit abandoned Sarah.
Wartime and the Legion
Cherokee Confederate reunion in New Orleans, 1903. (Public Domain)
The war between North and South brought bitter divisions to the mountains. Many of these mountaineers, like Thomas, opposed succession, and some headed north to fight for the Union. Others who considered the conflict a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” deserted the Southern forces or hid from the draft in the mountain hollers they knew so well. It truly was a war of neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother.
Though the Cherokee reflected these divisions, many were willing to follow Will Thomas and fight against the North, in part because they remembered all too well the federal troops who had driven their fellow Cherokees west on the deadly “Trail of Tears.” During this war, Thomas’s Legion of Indians and Highlanders gained a fearsome reputation for their backwoods skills and talents for combat. In one of their first battles, outraged by the loss of a favorite leader, some of the Cherokee scalped their dead enemies, a scandal Thomas much regretted and which was never again repeated. For most of the war, Thomas and his Legionnaires guarded Western North Carolina against federal raids and tracked down deserters.
Legacy
After the Civil War, Will Thomas lived the next three decades broken in health, mind, and spirit. His fortunes were eaten up by the war and by his generosity, and he died in a mental institution in Morganton, North Carolina.
Yet the gifts he bestowed both on the Cherokee and on the mountain people were lasting. The Qualla Boundary remains even today a bastion of Cherokee culture. Just before his death, Thomas was sound enough in mind to spend several days with James Mooney of the Smithsonian Institute, giving him invaluable information about Cherokee history and culture. He had also constantly promoted the Smokies as a place ripe for development. The railroad branch he envisioned from Asheville to Waynesville, North Carolina, the town that played so important a part in Thomas’s fortunes, brought trade and tourists following the war.
This map of the Qualla Boundary of the reservation for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians was designed by Will Thomas. (Public Domain)
Today, Thomas lies buried beneath a modest gravestone beside his wife Sarah in Waynesville’s Green Hill cemetery. On the back of this monument, which was erected by his daughter, Sara Avery, are listed his accomplishments. Surely the tribute that would have brought Thomas the most joy is the sentence reading, “As friend, counselor, and chief of the North Carolina Cherokee Indians he spent more than thirty years in their service.”
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Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make The Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
