Painter:
Charles Bird King,
Washington, date: unknown

Tah-chee

was born shortly after the Revolution and lived in the first part of the nineteenth century. His days were occupied with war, raids, horse stealing, scouting and hunting.  Dutch, as he is known to frontier history, was a child when his family joined the first Cherokee removal from the big Indian village called Turkey Town on the Coosa River in what is now Alabama to the St. Francis River in Arkansas, west of the Mississippi. It was a wild country that had not known the white man's presence.

Tahchee's tribe was an enemy of the Comanche, they fought a lot. Tahchee went hunting with the men while the women raised and gathered crops for food. After awhile, Tahchee made peace with the Comanche and he decided that he would build a house along the Canadian River, leaving his tribe behind

Dutch roamed beyond the Mississippi and explored the Red River country. Years later a white man asked him how many buffalo he had killed and Dutch answered, "So many I cannot number them."

Catlin who met Dutch in 1834 called him "a guide and hunter for the regiment of dragoons.... The history of this man's life has been very curious and surprising; and I sincerely hope that someone, with more leisure and more talent than myself, will take it up, and do it justice. I promise that the life of this man furnishes the best materials for a popular tale, that are now to be procured on the Western frontier."

"The weakness of the enemy makes our strength"

"Don't let yesterday use up too much of today"

Cherokee Proverbs