North America. The Cherokee were originally divided into 30 or 40 independent chiefdoms (groups of villages) that were fiercely antagonistic to one another. With the rise of competition with the white man, it became increasingly common for individual Cherokee to rob or attack the camps of Western settlers, who, not distinguishing between different Cherokee tribes, would attack whichever Cherokee they encountered first. This gave rise to a different, forced behavior among the Cherokee: in 1730, the Indian chief Moytoy, for the first time, punished individual Indians who attacked white camps and attempted to establish contact with the settlers. Gradually, the Cherokee also became literate, adopting their own alphabet to express their language, which has survived to this day, and also adopting a written constitution. The Cherokee are among the Indian peoples who have a large and relatively rich Indian reservation between Tennessee and South Carolina, in the beautiful Smoky Mountains.
