William Holland Thomas and the Eastern Band of Cherokee

 

For a time, various circumstantial facts led me to suspect a connection by either blood or adoption to William Holland Thomas (1805-1893), the so-called "only white Indian Chief", leader of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. For a while I suspected that I was a direct descendant but now I believe the relationship is a good deal more distant, probably back in Wales, from whence the Thomases (like Dylan) hail.

William Holland Thomas’s father Richard Thomas (ca. 1750-1804) came from Wales and immigrated to Virginia. (Whereas my Thomas ancestors were Quakers who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1680s). He fought in the 11th Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He married Temperance Calvert (1775-1874), a grandniece of Lord Baltimore, the Founder of Maryland. Thomas was an entrepreneur; by 1804 the pair had moved out to the frontier, Raccoon Creek, near what is now Waynesville, North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. Richard drowned while Temperance was still carrying William, his only child.

Raised on the frontier by a single mother, it became necessary for William to work for a living starting at a young age. He ended up running a general store for Congressman Felix Walker (1752-1828). When their contract was up, Walker found himself pecuniarily embarrassed. Unable to pay Thomas in money, he gave him a large number of books, a certain percentage of which were law books. Thomas studied hard and became a lawyer.

Meanwhile he'd been a storekeeper in a rural area. He'd made a lot of friends in the community, most of them members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. This was a small group of several hundred Cherokee who'd managed to avoid being marched off in the Trail of Tears with the rest of the Eastern tribes. Thomas became their lawyer, and ended up winning several important Federal cases for them. He became the adopted son of the tribe's Chief Yonaguska and -- remarkably --- succeeded him as tribal leader when the latter died in 1839. Thomas thus became the only Caucasian ever to be the official chief of an Indian tribe. He bought large amounts of land for himself and for the tribe, and served six terms as a state senator from 1848 through 1860. By 1860, Thomas was won of the wealthiest men in Western North Carolina, holding $27,500 in personal property (3/4 of a million dollars in today’s money); 150,000 acres of real estate, valued at $122,725 (roughly the equivalent of $3.5 million), and owned 50 slaves, making him one of the largest slaveholders in the region (the region had one of the sparsest slave populations in the antebellum south).

In 1860 the Civil War broke out and the story gets even stranger. For Thomas was made a Colonel in the Confederate Army, and led a unit called Thomas's Legion of Cherokee Indians and Highlanders. That's right. He led a unit composed largely of one subjugated people in a war to ensure the continued subjugation of another people. The motives for this mind-numbing tangle are complicated. Even Thomas appears not to have been able to wrap his head around it all. Two years after the war was over, Thomas went insane, and was in and out of mental hospitals for the remainder of his life