Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – Dakwa, the Great Fish of Cherokee Country
At the mouth of Toco Creek in Monroe County, Tennessee, where the old Cherokee town of Toqua stood near the Little Tennessee River, the water once carried a name older than the maps around it. The Cherokee remembered the place as Dăkwă′ĭ, the place of the Dăkwă′, a great fish that lived in the river and was large enough to swallow a man.
This was not just a creature story floating loose from the land. It was tied to a creek, a town, a river crossing, and a Cherokee place name. By the time James Mooney published Myths of the Cherokee through the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1902, the Dakwa story had already passed through generations of Cherokee memory. Mooney recorded that “The Hunter in the Dăkwă′” was told by Swimmer and Ta′gwadihĭ′ and was well known in the tribe. He also preserved a different version from the Wahnenauhi manuscript, giving the story both an oral source trail and a Cherokee-authored manuscript tradition.
The written record is narrow, but it is unusually clear. Dakwa belongs to the Little Tennessee River valley, to the old Overhill Cherokee world, and to the long Appalachian tradition of dangerous water places remembered through story.
The Fish at Toco Creek
In Mooney’s telling, the Dakwa lived where Toco Creek entered the river at Dăkwă′ĭ, above the mouth of Tellico. The creature was so large that it could overturn a canoe and swallow a person whole. One day a canoe filled with warriors crossed from the town to the other side of the river. The Dakwa rose beneath them, threw them into the air, and snapped up one of the men as he fell.
When the hunter came to himself, he found that he was alive inside the fish. The place was dark, close, and hot. As he felt around in the belly of the Dakwa, his hand struck mussel shells the fish had swallowed. He took one shell and used it like a knife, scraping and cutting from within. The fish thrashed across the river, came up for air, and finally rested in shallow water near the bank. The hunter carefully climbed out through the opening he had cut, waded ashore, and returned to the settlement.
He lived, but the juices inside the great fish had scalded the hair from his head. After that, the story said, he was bald for the rest of his life.
The tale is short, but it carries the marks of an older river world. Canoes crossed from town to shore. Mussel shells lay in the belly of the fish, just as mussels lay in the river itself. The danger came from beneath, from a creature unseen until the moment it rose and broke the surface.
Swimmer and Ta′gwadihĭ′
The strongest named oral sources for the Dakwa story are Swimmer and Ta′gwadihĭ′, both Cherokee informants recorded by Mooney. Swimmer, also known as Aʻyûñ′inĭ, was one of Mooney’s most important Eastern Cherokee sources. Ta′gwadihĭ′ also appears throughout Mooney’s Cherokee material as a keeper of stories and traditions.
Mooney’s note on “The Hunter in the Dăkwă′” is important because it does not present the story as something he merely heard in passing. He says it was told by Swimmer and Ta′gwadihĭ′ and was well known in the tribe. That makes the Dakwa story one of the better-attested Cherokee monster traditions in his collection, even if the direct written record remains small.
This matters because many modern retellings of Appalachian folklore drift far from their source base. Dakwa has sometimes been turned into a generic river monster or cryptid, but the older record is more specific. It is a Cherokee story connected to a named place, named narrators, and a particular river setting in the old Overhill country.
The Wahnenauhi Version
Mooney also printed a second version from the Wahnenauhi manuscript. Wahnenauhi, also known as Lucy Lowrey Hoyt Keys, was a Cherokee woman whose manuscript, Historical Sketches of the Cherokees, Together with Some of their Customs, Traditions, and Superstitions, was later published by the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Her version differs from the hunter story. In it, a boy is sent on an errand by his father, but he does not want to go. He runs away to the river and plays in the sand. Some boys come by in a canoe and invite him to join them. After he gets in, the canoe begins to tip and rock. In the confusion, the disobedient boy falls into the water and is swallowed by a large fish.
Inside the fish, the boy becomes hungry. Seeing the fish’s liver hanging above him, he thinks it is dried meat and tries to cut off a piece with a mussel shell he had been holding. This sickens the fish, and it vomits the boy out.
The differences are worth noticing. In one version, a warrior or hunter survives by cutting his way out. In another, a disobedient boy is swallowed and escapes almost by accident. One story reads like a survival tale from a river crossing. The other carries the shape of a warning to children. Both keep the same core image: a person swallowed by a great fish, a mussel shell inside the belly, and escape from within.
Toqua, Toco, and Dăkwă′ĭ
Dakwa is also preserved in the place name. Mooney’s glossary defines dăkwă′ as a mythic great fish and also as the Cherokee word used for whale. He defines Dăkwă′ĭ as “Dăkwă place,” a former Cherokee settlement known to traders as Toqua or Toco, located on the Little Tennessee River near the mouth of Toco Creek in Monroe County, Tennessee.
That place is central to the story. Toqua was an eighteenth-century Overhill Cherokee town, but the site was much older than the written colonial record. Archaeological work identified Toqua, site 40MR6, as a late Mississippian Dallas phase town with mounds and later Cherokee occupation at the same location. In other words, the place where Dakwa was remembered was not an empty stretch of water. It was a deep human landscape, occupied, named, crossed, abandoned, returned to, studied, and eventually changed by modern reservoir development.
Henry Timberlake’s 1762 map of the Overhill Cherokee towns shows Toqua among the settlements along the river. Timberlake listed Toqua with eighty-two fighting men under the governor Willinawaw. Later historical references describe the town’s decline and survival through the Revolutionary era and afterward. By 1797, Louis-Philippe of France observed houses at Toqua, and his brother’s drawing became one of the rare contemporary images of an eighteenth-century Cherokee town.
The Dakwa story belongs to that layered place. It is folklore, but it is also geography. It tells us how a town name, a creek name, and a river danger could live together in memory.
The Father of the Fish Tribe
Mooney’s animal lore section adds another important detail. He says Toco Creek took its name from the mythic monster fish Dakwa, which was considered the father of all the fish tribe and was said to have once lived in the Little Tennessee River at that point.
That phrase gives the creature more weight than a simple monster. Dakwa was not just a big fish. It was a kind of ancestor or source figure among fish. In Cherokee tradition, animals and human beings often stand in moral relationship to one another. Deer, bears, wolves, birds, snakes, fish, and insects are not merely background scenery. They are part of a living order that can help, punish, deceive, heal, or remember.
Dakwa fits that world. The river is not empty water. It is inhabited. The fish are not only food. They have power, history, and spirit. A crossing can become dangerous when people forget that the water beneath them has its own life.
Dakwa and the Whale
Mooney noted that in Cherokee Bible translation, dăkwă′ was used as the equivalent of whale. That detail has led many writers to compare the Dakwa story with Jonah. The resemblance is obvious. A person is swallowed by a great fish and survives inside it. Mooney also pointed to John Haywood’s 1823 Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, where Haywood alluded to an old Cherokee tradition about a whale swallowing a little boy and later casting him back onto land.
The comparison is useful, but it should be handled carefully. The Cherokee story should not be reduced to a copy of Jonah. Great fish stories appear in many parts of the world, and Mooney himself placed the Dakwa story among a wider body of stories about people swallowed by large fish. At the same time, Cherokee speakers and translators did use dăkwă′ for whale in biblical contexts, so by the nineteenth century the language of Dakwa and the language of Jonah were close enough to touch.
The result is not a simple either-or answer. Dakwa may preserve older Cherokee water lore tied to a particular place on the Little Tennessee River. It may also have been retold in a world where Cherokee Christians, missionaries, Bible translators, and older oral traditions all interacted. The story survived because it could live in more than one setting.
Water Monsters in Cherokee Country
Dakwa was not alone in Cherokee water lore. Mooney recorded other dangerous beings tied to rivers, deep holes, and old place names. The Great Leech of Tlanusi’yi, the water cannibals, and other aquatic beings show how strongly Cherokee tradition marked certain streams and river places as powerful.
Albert S. Gatschet’s 1899 article “Water-Monsters of American Aborigines” treated Dakwa as part of a broader pattern of Indigenous water monster traditions. Gatschet drew on Mooney’s then-forthcoming Cherokee work and described Dakwa as a huge fish formerly seen in the Little Tennessee River above the junction of Tellico, at the mouth of Toccoa Creek.
Such comparative folklore can be helpful, but the local setting should stay first. Dakwa is not just one example in a general category. It is the great fish of Dăkwă′ĭ. Its strongest meaning comes from Cherokee memory, from the mouth of Toco Creek, and from the Overhill towns of the Little Tennessee.
A Changed River, An Older Memory
The old Toqua site is no longer experienced in the same way it was when the story was told. Twentieth-century archaeological excavations took place before the area was inundated by the Tellico Reservoir. Modern water now covers or changes much of the older landscape. Roads, dams, and reservoirs have altered the river valley that once held Toqua, Toco Creek, and the crossing places remembered in Cherokee tradition.
That makes the Dakwa story more important, not less. It preserves a river before the reservoir, a town before disappearance, and a name before it became only an entry in a glossary. Folklore often does that. It keeps the shape of a place after the place itself has been altered.
Dakwa also reminds us that Appalachian history is not only forts, railroads, mines, battles, and county seats. It is also river memory. It is the old Cherokee geography that still lies beneath many modern maps. A monster in the water can carry the history of a town, the meaning of a word, the memory of a crossing, and the warning that the natural world is never merely scenery.
Remembering Dakwa Today
For readers in Appalachia, Dakwa belongs to a larger pattern of mountain stories in which landscape and memory cannot be separated. The great fish is frightening, but it is also deeply local. It belongs to a bend of water, to a creek mouth, to an old town name, and to the Cherokee people who preserved the story long before it entered printed folklore.
The best source trail begins with Mooney, Swimmer, Ta′gwadihĭ′, and Wahnenauhi. It then widens into early references like Haywood, comparative folklore like Gatschet, and modern historical and archaeological work on Toqua. Taken together, these sources do not give us a long record, but they give us a strong one.
Some legends wander until they lose their home. Dakwa still has one. Its home is Dăkwă′ĭ, the place of the great fish, where Toco Creek met the Little Tennessee River and where Cherokee country remembered that something powerful lived below the surface.
Sources & Further Reading
Mooney, James. “Myths of the Cherokee.” In Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897–1898, 3–548. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/91694
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Project Gutenberg eBook. Originally published Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45634
Swimmer, also Aʻyûñ′inĭ, and Ta′gwadihĭ′. Oral accounts of “The Hunter in the Dăkwă′,” recorded in James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45634/45634-h/45634-h.htm
Wahnenauhi. “The Wahnenauhi Manuscript: Historical Sketches of the Cherokees, Together with Some of Their Customs, Traditions, and Superstitions.” Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 196, no. 77: 175–214. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1966. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/22138
Kilpatrick, Jack Frederick, ed. “The Wahnenauhi Manuscript: Historical Sketches of the Cherokees, Together with Some of Their Customs, Traditions, and Superstitions.” Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 196, no. 77: 175–214. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1966. https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/22138/bae_bulletin_196_1966_77_175-214.pdf
Haywood, John. The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee: Up to the First Settlements Therein by the White People, in the Year 1768. Nashville: George Wilson, 1823. https://archive.org/details/naturalaborigina00hayw
Gatschet, Albert S. “Water-Monsters of American Aborigines.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 12, no. 47 (1899): 255–260. https://www.jstor.org/stable/533052
Gatschet, Albert S. “Water-Monsters of American Aborigines.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 12, no. 47 (1899): 255–260. Wikisource transcription. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Journal_of_American_Folk-Lore/Volume_12/Issue_47/Water-Monsters_of_American_Aborigines
Schroedl, Gerald F. “Toqua.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society, March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/toqua/
Chapman, Jefferson, and Richard R. Polhemus. The Toqua Site, 40MR6: A Late Mississippian, Dallas Phase Town. Knoxville: Tennessee Valley Authority and University of Tennessee Department of Anthropology, 1987. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6897769
Polhemus, Richard R., ed. The Toqua Site, 40MR6: A Late Mississippian, Dallas Phase Town. Report of Investigations No. 41. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Department of Anthropology, 1987. https://core.tdar.org/document/151120/toqua-site-40mr6-a-late-mississippian-dallas-phase-town-2-volumes
Timberlake, Henry. The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake, Who Accompanied the Three Cherokee Indians to England in the Year 1762. London: W. Nicoll and C. Henderson, 1765. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65256
Timberlake, Henry. “A Draught of the Cherokee Country.” In The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake. London: W. Nicoll and C. Henderson, 1765. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/65256/pg65256-images.html
University of Tennessee Libraries. “A Draught of the Cherokee Country, Taken by Henry Timberlake.” Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.lib.utk.edu/concern/books/525a9cb9-d055-448c-8a0f-e2687660fcd9
Schroedl, Gerald F. “Louis-Philippe’s Journal and Archaeological Investigations at the Eighteenth-Century Overhill Cherokee Town of Toqua.” Journal of Cherokee Studies 3, no. 4 (1978): 206–220. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2190/NA.32.2.b
Tennessee Historical Society. “View of Toqua on the Little Tennessee River.” Tennessee Historical Society, October 26, 2017. https://tennesseehistory.org/view-toqua-little-tennessee-river/
Cherokee Bible Project. “Jonah 1.” Cherokee Bible Project Online Since 2001. https://sites.google.com/site/cherokeebibleproject/old-testament-verses/jonah
Cherokee Bible Project. “Jonah 2.” Cherokee Bible Project Online Since 2001. https://sites.google.com/site/cherokeebibleproject/old-testament-verses/jonah/jonah-2
Oklahoma Historical Society. “A. N. Chamberlin Collection, 1893.” Finding Aid 1982.032. https://okhistory.org/research/findingaid?id=001cwg
Ellison, George. “Cherokee’s Own Big Fish Legend.” Smoky Mountain News, March 16, 2011. https://smokymountainnews.com/archives/item/3466-cherokee%E2%80%99s-own-big-fish-legend
Ellison, George. “Big Fish of the Smokies.” Smoky Mountain News, December 22, 2010. https://smokymountainnews.com/archives/item/2959-big-fish-of-the-smokies
Bridges, Anne, Russell Clement, and Ken Wise. Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544–1934. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781621900146_A50771029/preview-9781621900146_A50771029.pdf
Author Note: This article follows the earliest available source trail for Dakwa, beginning with James Mooney, Cherokee oral informants Swimmer and Ta′gwadihĭ′, and the Wahnenauhi manuscript. Because Cherokee traditions are living cultural material, this piece treats the story as documented folklore tied to place, language, and memory, not as a modern cryptid claim.