Indians of Hancock County, Tennessee
The Cherokee Boundary of 1785 went through Sneedville as did the Kentucky Road [Wilderness Trail] as the map below shows.
I have not found the source for this nor can I vouch for it's accuracy;
John Reed Swanton's Indians of the Southeastern United StatesBulletin 137 of the Bureau of American Ethnology,Smithsonian Institution, 1946.
''Swanton reported that there were three bands of the Yuchi (Uchee or Euchee): a southern one centered near the present Macon, Georgia; a middle one near the present Talladega, Alabama; and a northern one centered on Newman's Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. The northern band were not among the Yuchi forced to relocate in Indian Territory in the 1830s. They were settled on the Qualla Reservation with the Eastern Cherokee band and allowed one representative on the tribal council. All deliberations were in Cherokee, which none of the Yuchi understood (understandable, since Cherokee belongs to the Iroquoian language stock and Yuchi to the Siouan one). After two years of feeling like strangers among the Cherokees, the Yuchi left and returned to Newman's Ridge.''
It is interesting though that the "Emassees and Malunjins show up together in Dothan, Alabama.
THE EMASSEES AND MALUNJINS
One tribe of Indians and a community of mixed breed Indians were unmolested by the whites. These were the Uchees or Emassees, kinsman of the Seminoles or Creeks, who lived at the mouth of the Emassee or O'Mussee or Mercer creek near Columbia, and the Malunjins, a mixed breed community residing some three to six miles northeast of Dothan toward Webb even as late as 1865. Where the Malunjins came from nobody knows; where they were dispersed to is the limbo of forgotten men. B. P. Poyner, Sr., father of Houston County Probate Judge, S.P.Poyner, was born in the Malunjins' community. Some of these mixed breed Indians brought milk to Mr. Poyner's mother while he was an infant. The Emassees were allied by affinity with the Creeks and Seminoles yet during all of Alabama's territorial and state days were friendly to the whites. Only a squatter white family settled here and there and lived in old Henry County prior to 1817. Save for these squatters there were no white settlers in Henry County at the time of the Creek War of 1812-13. The Alabama Lawyer: Official Organ State Bar of AlabamaBy Alabama State BarPublished by The Bar, 1942
On November 6, 1837, the Hawkins County Land Platt Book records the survey for James Livesay of 500 acres of land on an "Indian village on the waters of Painter [Panther Creek] on the north side of Clinch River."
THE MORRISTOWN GAZETTE
NOTES AND DOTS
Sneedville, Aug. 16, 1878.To the Editor of the Morristown Gazette :
Where the village of Sneedville is situated was once an Indian town. There are any quantity of flints half finished, scattered about over a wide extent in and around the village, showing that this was a place where they manufactured darts for their arrows, with which they killed their game. Many battle-axes, tomahawks, pestles, and remnants of Instruments and vessels of pottery used by the aborigines have been picked up in years gone by, so that now they are seldom found. Within a quarter of a mile of the court-house there is still visible a round-shaped knoll which may be a mound. It was once much sharper than it now is, so sharp that cattle never resorted to it for rest. It has been ploughed over and cultivated; and is now very much flattened.. I have seen many mounds, and am inclined to express it as my opinion that this - is a regular mound. Right here, allow me to say that I am in correspondence with the officers of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D. C, who request me to collect all evidences of these singular formations, and transmit information and specimens to them. which I am doing, and respectfully request those who have any Indian battle-axes, tomahawks, arrow heads pottery, or other implements or trinkets once in posession of the Indians who formerly roamed over this country as "lords of creation," to send them to me at Morristown.
