Tsali, originally of Coosawattee Town (Kusawatiyi), was a noted figure at two different periods of Cherokee history, both of them vital.
From which of the main divisions of the Cherokee prior to the American Revolution he came is not known, but records do indicate that as a young man he followed Dragging Canoe from the time the latter migrated southwest during the Chickamauga Wars.
It was during the turbulent years leading up to the War of 1812 and the Creek War that he made his first appearance as a major figure on the Cherokee national scene. When the teachings of Tenskwatawa, brother of Shawnee leader Tecumseh and known as the "Shawnee Prophet", began to filter down to the Native Americans of the Southeast, they sparked a traditionalist cultural and religious revival. Among the Cherokee it inspired what anthropologist James Mooney dubbed the "Cherokee Ghost Dance movement". This revival multiplied in strength after the visit of Tecumseh to the council of the Upper Muscogee and representatives of the other tribes of the Southeast at Tuckabatchee calling on them to band together, abandon the ways of acculturation, and take up arms together in a united war against the Americans.
The Cherokee National Council had sent a small delegation led by The Ridge to hear what Tecumseh had to say, and after his otherwise well-received speech when Tecumseh asked the Cherokee delegation when he could speak to their National Council, The Ridge replied that if Tecumseh, who had fought alongside many of the Cherokee leaders in the late 1780s during the Chickamauga Wars, set one foot inside the Cherokee Nation that The Ridge would kill him.
Some weeks after that Council, at approximately that time Tecumseh would have arrived back in his own town in the north, the 1812 New Madrid earthquake struck, affecting the entire continent of North America, with aftershocks for weeks afterwards. The legend spread that after his rejection by the Cherokee at Tuckabatchee, Tecumseh had promised that when he returned home, he would stomp his foot down on the earth so that the anger of the Great Spirit would come upon the Earth.
In a Council meeting at Ustanali some weeks after the New Madrid quake, out of the town of Coosawattee came a traditionalist prophet known as Tsali to speak to the Council. His speech was very eloquent and inspirational, and when he was finished, nearly all those present were swayed. Then The Ridge, the widely-acknowledged best orator among the entire Cherokee Nation, stood and began to decry everything that had just been spoken. Zealous followers of Tsali attacked The Ridge, who fought back against his attackers until he was overwhelmed and saved for death only by the intervention of a friend.
The very fact that he defied Tsali, however, caused the latter to lose face with the Council, which had been at the point of voting nearly unanimously to support Tecumseh's war. In anger, Tsali prophesied a great apocalypse raining down from the sky on the Cherokee Nation, with the only safe haven being the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina, to which he then departed.
No apocalypse came, of course (unless you count the trail of tears a generation later), but the National Council refused The Ridge's entreaties that they support the Americans in their conflict with the British during the War of 1812. The Council only got involved in the Creek War after being requested to do so by the Lower Muscogee, who had not heeded Tecumseh's words at Tuckabatchee.
Nothing more was heard from Tsali until the late days of the round-up of Cherokee in the Cherokee Nation in preparation for forced removal to the Cherokee Nation West in what was to become Indian Territory. When the soldiers came into the small group of farmsteads owned by Tsali's extended family in the Snowbird Mountains of western North Carolina, they were attacked, and some of them killed.
Both John Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation and Yonaguska, Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee on the Oconaluftee River condemned Tsali's action in the strongest of terms and offered to help run him and his family down. Yonaguska being the closest was given the task, and in order to assist other nearby Cherokee in staying, asked not only his warriors but those of his friend Utsala on the Nanthahala River to take party in the hunt.
Accounts of what ultimately happened are somewhat conflicted, but the affair ended with Tsali and two of his sons being executed by a Cherokee firing squad. The rest of his large family was allowed to remain under the umbrella of the Eastern Band.
A highly legendary account of the affair can be seen at Qualla Boundary in the play loosely-based on the events called Unto These Hills, the first version of which was originally written by Kermit Hunter in 1950.