The Secret History of the Cherokee People

French Colonial Archives in Canada and the writings of the Cherokee’s greatest leader, Principal Chief Charles Hicks, tell a very different story than the propaganda, which proliferates in the media

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

Remember the “Mayas in Georgia Controversy” in the year 2012? It all began innocent enough. I was homeless and living in an abandoned chicken house near Track Rock Gap, GA, but it did have an office with electricity and telephone-internet connection. My main source of income was as the National Architecture Columnist for the Examiner. The Examiner never knew that I was homeless!

On December 21, 2011 I wrote a column in the Examiner about the Track Rock Terrace Complex, which I had stumbled upon on June 21 of that year. It was identical in every detail to Itza Maya agricultural terrace complexes that I had visited in Chiapas State, Mexico and the Guatemalan Highlands. Both the Creeks and the Cherokees used a name for that part of Georgia, which means Place of the Itza. Prior to around 1725, the main town in the nearby Nacoochee Valley (where I live now) was named Itsate, which means “Itza People” in their language. That was also the name of the language spoken by the majority of Creeks in Georgia!

I wrote the article with the assumption that several universities would immediately jump onto the site and obtain grants for a thorough archaeological investigation. The article would be the end of my involvement with “Injun thangs” and I could get back to re-creating my architecture practice. That was not to happen.

Instead, by early January, very slanderous articles were appearing in Georgia newspapers, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which consisted of interviews with certain Georgia archaeologists and bureaucrats in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who obviously didn’t know diddlysquat about the ancient origins of the Creek People or my professional background. I had to quickly write a book about Track Rock Gap in order to have a published record of the facts. That book has turned into a full time devotion to discerning the Southeast’s real history.

In early February, something very odd began happening. Somehow, the email address I used in 2006, when acting president of the Georgia Trail of Tears Association had gotten thrown into the list of email addresses, belonging to the conspirators. I started receiving emails addressed to the Georgia Trail of Tears Association from all the conspirators in the Maya Myth-busting in the Mountains Political Campaign. They included: (1) US Forest Service offices and federal law enforcement personnel in North Carolina, Gainesville, Atlanta and Washington, DC (2) Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Cultural Preservation Office (3) Cherokee Nation Cultural Preservation Office in Oklahoma (4) United Keetoowah Cherokee Band in Oklahoma (5) Muscogee-Creek Nation Cultural Preservation Office in Oklahoma (6) Georgia Council of Professional Archaeologists (7) Society for Georgia Archaeology (8) Georgia Republican Party (9) Mike Torpy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (10) Georgia Trail of Tears Association*

*None of the conspirators seemed to be aware of the irony that I had been the architect of Oklahoma’s Trail of Tears Memorial in Tulsa!

I was astonished to see the names and recognize the faces of several high ranking administrators and public relations specialists in the US Forest Service. They had been members of my ex-wife’s witch cult in Asheville! When they came out to the farm for rituals, I would have to leave. I wondered if they realized who I was.

Well, the US Navy taught me well. I knew how to deal with intelligence treasure troves. To each initial letters from one of the conspirators I sent this message: “We Cherokees in Georgia are very upset with the attempt by some white crazies to steal our heritage. Please keep us informed!” Signed – Tallamachusee of Chattahoochee Band of Cherokees. Both the Cherokees and Creeks in Oklahoma were too dumb to catch on that Tallamachusee was a Creek-derived word and Chattahoochee is a Itza Maya derived word! LOL The conspirators kept Chief Tallamachusee well-informed until mid-2013 when the campaign fizzled out. I would print out their letters then delete them so no federal snooper would catch on.

It was absolutely fascinating how the federal bureaucrats manipulate tribal bureaucrats by dangling pocket change and free conferences in other areas of the country in front of their eyes. Nothing has changed in 300 years, has it? I also saw how the Cherokee cultural preservation offices manipulated the other tribes in Oklahoma. They sent letters to the Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles, but those tribes were not interested in getting involved. The letters stated that a group of white people in Georgia were trying to steal the Cherokees’ and Creeks’ history in Georgia and that all the tribes should fight this attempt with a united front. Latter letters from the Cherokees proposed that they reach a political compromise in which both the Cherokee and Muskogee-Creek tribes built the terraces at Track Rock Gap.

The truth was, of course, that Track Rock Gap was in the territory of the Creek Confederacy until 1785. However, the Muskogee-Creeks had nothing to do with any of the 16+terrace complexes in Georgia. Neither they nor the Cherokees were anywhere around in 1000 AD. It was my ancestors, the Itsate and Apalache Creeks, who built them. Until I was in my early twenties, I always thought that the Muskogees were the enemies of the Creeks. The Muskogee speakers were originally invaders, who fought a long bloody war with the indigenous Creeks of Georgia.

I have NO North American Indian DNA. All of my Asiatic DNA is from southern Mexico, eastern Peru, Lapland and Polynesia. Two of my gggg-grandfathers and my g-grandfather were Creek Wind Clan mikkos (chiefs). In the 1930’s my mother’s family received reparation checks from the federal government to atone for over 3000 acres being stolen from them in 1870, because they were Creek Indians. In other words, we were recognized as being Creek Indians by the federal government and at that time could have formed a federally-recognized tribal town.

For twenty years, federal and Georgia state law enforcement have been actively involved in sabotaging my professional activities and for most of the time, certain federal officers have been advising and protecting the Cherokees. In 2006, state law officers contacted the Georgia Council of Professional Archaeologists to tell them that I was building an architectural model for the Muscogee-Creek Nation. What these crooked cops didn’t know was that this was a personal contract with Judge Patrick Moore, not the tribal government. Nevertheless, the six members of this council sent a letter to the tribe, demanding that they cancel my contract.

In 2012, while I was interviewing a farm wife about her apple farm and market for the Examiner, a federal law enforcement officer called her cellular phone and literally said these words, “I am watching you from the sky above. Don’t pay any attention to what Thornton says about the Mayas. He is crazy. Don’t listen to him.”

Just last week, while I was on the conference phone call with a TV network’s producers and writers about a forthcoming one hour special on the Mayas in Georgia, a Georgia law enforcement officer called the network’s executives to tell them that I was being investigated for a heinous crime (a lie,f course). They responded that they had already done a background check on me. “Mr. Thornton has no criminal record and had earned all the degrees that he claims to have earned.” That call was followed by a call two days later from someone high up in the Trump Administration, accompanied by threats of political retribution, if they do a program about the Mayas in Georgia.

What are the Cherokees trying to hide?

This experience opened my eyes to how extensively federal, state and tribal bureaucrats manipulate the information the public sees about Native American culture. I was curious, though. Why would the three out-of-state, federally-recognized Cherokee tribes go to such extreme measures to destroy someone in Georgia, who was about as politically impotent as one could possibly be? Why is the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians buying Creek, Uchee and Chickasaw mounds in Georgia in order to re-label them “Sacred Cherokee Heritage Sites.” Why such viciously aggressive actions? What were the Cherokees hiding?

Back in 1997, I had been the consulting architect for the restoration of the first home of Cherokee Principal Chief Charles Hicks. A Historic Preservation Architect must to do extensive research before drawing a line. At first, I could find virtually nothing on his life. This was before the days of the internet. Eventually, I learned that he was the father of the Cherokee Renaissance and its capital, New Echota. He planned New Echota! He was de facto Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1817 till 1827, when he died. He had one of the largest personal libraries in the United States.

It was Hicks who suggested to the Cherokee National Committee that a silver medal be awarded to George Gist, aka Sequoyah. After Sequoyah went back to Arkansas, Hicks in 1826 then noted that Sequoyah’s symbols were extremely difficult to learn and that white Christians felt threatened by what they perceived was the devil’s writing. He then asked his Moravian pastors and Samuel Worcester to create a system that would be easier to learn and less threatening to whites. Worcester did just that. In the last year of his life, Hicks wrote a series of letters to John Ross, President of the National Committee, which described in detail the history of the Cherokee People. Those letters were at the University of Tennessee Library, at least until 1947 . . . but now they were missing.

Although the Hicks almost single-handedly responsible for the great advancements made by the Cherokees in the early 1800s, he is barely mentioned at the New Echota Museum. I thought that to be very odd. I also thought the answer might be in his “History of the Cherokee People” that he wrote for John Ross. It took many years to find the original letters, but I obtained copies of them the same year that I found the lost Creek Migration Legends.

Those hand-written papers are the basis of the very first book on Principal Chief Charles Hicks, which I will be publishing in mid-August. It is clear from other papers he wrote, that he considered Coweta Creek mikko, William McIntosh, to be a close friend . . . so much for the false fact that the Cherokees and Creeks were always enemies.

Hicks had NO ethnic Cherokee blood. His father was English (not Scottish as Wikipedia states) and from a Quaker family in Virginia. His mother was mixed Jewish-Itsate Creek and was born in a Tamale Creek village on the Flint River in SW Georgia that moved to where Hiwassee, GA now is. His wife was also mixed Itsate Creek and white, being born in the ancient Maya town of Chote in the Nacoochee Valley, where Helen now sits. Most of Hick’s brothers and sisters lived in eastern Georgia as “white” people. His father and eldest brother lived in the section of old Washington County, GA on the Oconee River that is now the Dublin Area.

Hicks clearly stated that the Cherokees were originally a Northern tribe, who were driven southward by the Iroquois. They began moving into northeastern Tennessee around the time that Charleston was settled (1670). Other key facts that he stated are:

• The Cherokees did not build mounds, nor did they bury their dead in mounds or under piles of stone.
• The Cherokees did not move into North Carolina until a plague had greatly weakened the “mound builders.” By mound builders, he means my ancestors, the Itstate Creeks or Maya descendants.
• The Cherokees killed or drove off the mound builders. They burned the mound build temples and then replaced them with Cherokee town houses (council chambers).
• The Cherokees were members of the Apalachen Confederacy and allies of the Creeks until the early 1700s.
• The people in South Carolina and northeast tip of Georgia, now called the Lower Cherokees, were not considered to be ethnic Cherokees by the real Cherokees.
• The Cherokees never lived south of the Hiwassee River in North Carolina until after the American Revolution. They could not have possibly built the Track Rock stone walls.
• The only traditional religion of the Cherokees involved the worship and conjuring of demons. In Hicks’ day, the conjurers held much power over the more conservative and thus, poorer
• While in Northeast Tennessee and North Carolina, some Cherokees absorbed many Jewish religious practices from their Jewish neighbors. These Jewish-influence Cherokees became the progressive leaders of the new Cherokee Nation, but they were always at odds with the conjurers. Hicks converted to Christianity after attending Methodist evangelical meetings in Pine Log, GA. However, he ultimately decided to join the Moravian Church.

Hicks stated that during the first few years of the Creek-Cherokee War, the Cherokees captured thousands of Creeks, who either were burned to death or sold as slaves in Charleston, SC. After the Creeks organized into a single confederacy there was a stalemate, but after a great smallpox plague in the 1730s, the Cherokees were always on the defensive. In the last year of the war, 1754, many Cherokees were killed in battle and most of their villages were burned. Ultimately the Cherokees lost all the lands they had won, when they signed the peace treaty with the Creeks.

French Colonial Archives

The rest of the story was filled in recently by scholars in Canada, who subscribe to The Americas Revealed. Father Ste. Marie was a Jesuit missionary to the Hurons, Tionontecs and Cherokees. He wrote extensively about these peoples and his letters are preserved in the Toronto Central Library.

The Cherokees lived in New France until 1649, when they were driven out by the Iroquois. They were vassals of the Tiononteca, which originally was a Nahuatl tribe in northern Mexico. The Tiononteca lived in man-made caves and were allies of the Hurons.

The primary vocation of the Canada Cherokees was being porters for goods around the Great Falls of the St. Lawrence River. The Cherokees hauled these goods in small, two-wheeled carts, called charettes by the French. Father St. Marie could not determine how long they had used these carts or who taught them how to make wheels.

Father Ste. Marie stated that the Cherokees were given their name by Samuel Champlain. He combined the Late Medieval French word for a cart with the Algonquian and Irish Gaelic suffix for “tribe or people” to create the tribal name Charequi, which was also written as Charaqui, Chariaque and Charakey.

The Tiononteca and Cherokee first settled in what is now southern West Virginia. The Shawnee and Iroquois continued to attack them . . . to the point that there were more Cherokees surviving than Tiononteca. The survivors moved to NE Tennessee and formed an alliance with the remnants of other tribes, such as the Chiska. This was the beginning of the tribe’s rise to becoming a regional power. Unfortunately, the wars between the Cherokees and northern tribes continued until the eve of the American Revolution.

During the winter and spring of 2010, I was living among the Snowbird Cherokees in Graham County, NC. They are called “Moon Faces” by the main body of Cherokees. Having a friendly rapport with the Snowbird Stickball Team, I asked them about Charles Hicks. They said that they believe that the conjurers slowly poisoned Charles Hicks because he brought in the Christian missionaries. They also said that many people on the main Qualla Reservation and in Oklahoma blame the Christians for causing the Trail of Tears. Their perspective is that the demons punished the Cherokees for allowing Christian worship on Cherokee Land. Of course, most Cherokees would never tell this insider information to a white person, especially a tourist or academician, but everything I saw firsthand backs up this interpretation.

I responded to them that from around 1700 onward the Cherokees were living on land that they stole from some other tribes at the same time that they dispatched many thousands of indigenous peoples into slavery. Couldn’t it also be that the Trail of Tears was the punishment meted by the ancestral spirits of their victims? There was silence among the Snowbird Cherokee stickball players.

Thinking that I was a broken man, because an alliance of the neo-fascists wearing badges and satanists wearing false smiles in Pickens County, Georgia had stripped me of every thing, including love, the occultists among the North Carolina Cherokees invited me to a conjuring – demon worshiping ceremony. Instead of being converted, I took careful mental notes. Beware of Creeks bearing gifts! Or was it don’t let a wooden Creek horse in your city?

The answer to our second question at the beginning of the article is quite obvious. Much of our federal bureaucracy and law enforcement is under the control of cults . . . varying in flavor from far right to far left . . . but always putting their particular brand’s triumph over the welfare of our nation and world. Who do you think is responsible for Covid19 appearing simultaneously around the world (including NE Georgia) in late November 2019 then the increasing violence that will lead up to an attempted coup d’etats followed by hoped-for martial law in September 2020?