Speculations about Knoxville's own Anastasia

by Jack Neely

Toward the end of the 1982 World's Fair, I wanted a job as a tour guide in the museum of Egyptian archaeology. It sounded like better work than another job somebody thought would be perfect for me, poring over receipts in a windowless office on Cedar Bluff, failing to sort out the World's Fair housing mess. To prove I was perfect for a transfer, I borrowed all the library's books about Egyptian history and mythology, with special attention to the reign of Queen Hatshepsut and the artifacts on display in the pavilion. I got the job. For six weeks, in a blazer and khakis, I passed for an Egyptologist.

The most striking thing about studying this foreign 5,000-year-old civilization where they worshipped dung beetles and mummified cats was how familiar these stories were. There was one story about a prince who suspects his uncle of having assassinated his father, the king, and with the help of his mother and his father's ghost, defeats him.

The story of the Egyptian deity Horus is the story of Hamlet. I began to understand that people die, nations die, languages die—but stories don't die. Stories survive the centuries, just with different characters playing the leading roles.

Hollywood's latest corruption of an old story is called Anastasia, made as if on a dare from someone who didn't believe you could use the Russian Revolution and the massacre of the Romanovs as the premise for a cartoon with cute animals. A large family slaughtered, a child secretly spared who lives among us in disguise. The Russians didn't invent that story. I doubt the Knoxvillians did, either—but ours is much older.

In West Knoxville, historical allusions are rare. Given the chance to name streets, most developers opt for the titles of make-believe British earls. But on one corner in the modern subdivision West Hills, a short street called Doublehead Lane T's into a longer street called Alexander Cavet Drive. In 1793, very near this quiet suburban intersection, the Doublehead of Doublehead Lane murdered Alexander Cavet and his family.

If we can believe the white man's histories, Doublehead was the most ruthless of all Cherokee chiefs. Leader of the rebellious anti-white band the Chickamaugans, Doublehead didn't get along with many of his own people. To call him a bloodthirsty savage is too accurate to be politically incorrect. Doublehead had reportedly cooked and eaten some victims. Many of the Cherokee feared and hated Doublehead, called him Kill-Baby.

Doublehead led a band of perhaps 1,000 Indians, mostly Creeks and Cherokees, who sought vengeance against the white nation they may have suspected could never be kept within boundaries by peaceful means. The actions of the pan-tribal Chickamaugans weren't sanctioned by the Cherokee rank and file, who were still betting they could trust the white man. Most Cherokees found the Chickamaugans' methods too vicious, and their goal—to drive all whites back east of the Appalachians—unrealistic. Doublehead and the others approached Knoxville—the capital of the white Southwestern Territory in 1793—with the intention of destroying it once and for all. At no other time in history—including the federal artillery assault, the Confederate artillery assault, or the entire Cold War—did Knoxville come so close to being obliterated.

But an argument between the two chiefs, Doublehead and John Watts, stalled them out some eight miles west of town. Reportedly, their point of contention was whether to kill all the men in Knoxville—or all the men, women, and children. While they debated, Knoxville's tiny garrison executed a diversionary tactic as Sevier's army approached from the distant south.

Frustrated by their confusion about where Knoxville's defenders were, the Chickamaugans besieged a tiny fort called Cavet's Station, manned by three armed men and 10 women and children. In the battle, the Cavets killed two Indians and wounded three others before an English-speaking Chickamaugan offered generous terms of surrender: The whites were to be taken captive and traded for Indian captives.

But as soon as the white men emerged, Doublehead and a few allies rushed in and killed them. Then they murdered the other 10 members of the Cavet family, scalped and/or disemboweled them, and strewed body parts across the shrubs and gardens of Cavet Station. They burned the fort to the ground.

"Not one," reported the Knoxville Gazette, "escaped the horrid carnage."

At least that's how the original reports had it. Within a few months, a story surfaced that one of Cavet's children was spared when John Watts interrupted Doublehead's orgy of slaughter.

For years there were rumors that one young Cavet had survived. But there are as many stories as there are tellers. By one, the child-survivor was a baby boy who "soon began screaming so much he was bashed against a tree and killed." One letter from South Carolina in 1794 reported the child was living among the Creeks. Thomas Humes, in the address he gave on the occasion of Knoxville's 50th birthday in 1842, outlined the Cavet tragedy and mentioned a child "saved by John Watts, taken as prisoner to the Creek Nation, and afterward tomahawked."

But by a couple of stories, the child who was saved was a girl. One report has the Cavet survivor as an 8-year-old girl named Nacie—an unusual name then and now. It sounds like a diminutive. It could almost be an American nickname for Anastasia.