CHRONICLES OF WOLFTOWN: SOCIAL DOCU- 

 MENTS OF THE NORTH CAROLINA CHEROKEES, 

 1850-1862 



By Anna Gritts Kilpatrick and Jack Frederick Kilpatrick 



INTRODUCTION 



THE INOLI LETTERS AND OTHER DOCUMENTS 



"Very little information is available for the Eastern Cherokee from 

 1848 until the outbreak of the Civil War," write Fogelson and Kutsche 

 (1961, p. 103). A considerable amount of information has actually 

 existed, but it has not been available to scholarship owing to its having 

 remained in the Cherokee language, in the Sequoyah syllabary, in 

 which it was written by the Cherokees themselves. 



An imposing corpus of these data is contained in a file of manuscripts 

 in the archives of the Bureau of American Ethnology known as "The 

 Inoli Letters," No. 2241-a. Many of these documents are undated, 

 but those that bear dates establish a time range of from 1849 to 1884. 

 The bulk of this material faUs within four broad categories: (1) docu- 

 ments pertaining to the civic affau's and cultural climate of WoKtown, 

 the easternmost of the communities of the North Carolina Cherokees, 

 1850-62; (2) documents pertaining to the participation of the North 

 Carolina Cherokees in the War Between the States, 1862-65; (3) 

 documents pertaining to the affairs of the tribal government of the 

 Eastern Band adopted in 1870, 1871-84; and (4) miscellaneous docu- 

 ments such as personal letters, reports of Christian activities, and 

 trivia. A few of the manuscripts, rather consistently those of small 

 interest, are in English. 



In addition to the material filed under The Inoli Letters, No. 2241-a, 

 there are in the Bureau of American Ethnology archives three small 

 collections that are cognates — Nos. 2241-b, 2279-a, and 2280. 



The Inoli Letters were acquired by James Mooney in the autumn 

 of 1888, when he was a member of the staff of the Bureau of American 

 Ethnology. Mooney (1891, pp. 314-316) records the circumstances: 



In the course of further inquiries in regard to the whereabouts of other manu- 

 scripts ... we heard a great deal about Inall, or "Black Fox," who had died a 

 few years before at an advanced age, and who was universally admitted to have 



