Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – Cherokee Star Lore: The Pleiades, the Pine, and the Mountain Sky
On cold clear nights in the southern mountains, when the sky opens above the ridges and the leaves are gone from the trees, the Pleiades can appear like a small bright cluster of sparks. Astronomers know the group as Messier 45, a star cluster in Taurus with about a thousand members, though only a handful are usually visible to the naked eye. NASA notes that about six of its stars can be seen without aid from October to April in the northern constellation Taurus.
For the Cherokee, one recorded tradition remembered those stars not as distant fire alone, but as boys. In James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee, the Pleiades are called Ani′tsutsă, “The Boys,” and their story is tied to a townhouse, a game, a circle dance, a grieving mother, and the pine tree. It is one of the strongest Cherokee star lore stories for Appalachian history because it belongs to the old Cherokee world of townhouses, cornfields, ceremony, children, mothers, mountains, and sky.
This story should be handled with care. It is not proof that every Cherokee person told the story the same way, and it should not be folded into a vague category of “Native American astronomy.” It is best understood as a Cherokee tradition recorded by named collectors and informants, preserved in several versions, and still echoed in modern Cherokee Nation educational material.
Mooney and the Cherokee Mountains
The best known printed version comes from James Mooney, whose Myths of the Cherokee appeared in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Mooney wrote that the myths in his paper came from a large body of material collected chiefly among the Cherokee during field seasons from 1887 to 1890, including notes and Cherokee manuscripts on history, ceremonies, medicine, language, and other subjects.
Mooney also placed much of his work in the mountains. He wrote that the Cherokee had held a broad southern mountain region reaching from the headwaters of the Kanawha and Tennessee southward, and from the Blue Ridge westward toward the Cumberland range. He also explained that much of his myth material came from East Cherokee communities in the Qualla area of western North Carolina and nearby settlements between the reservation and the Tennessee line.
That Appalachian setting matters. The Pleiades and the Pine is not simply a tale about stars. It begins near the townhouse, the public center of Cherokee town life. Christopher B. Rodning’s work on Cherokee townhouses describes them as public structures that anchored communities to particular places in the southern Appalachian landscape and served as settings for public life, identity, and memory.
Seven Boys at the Townhouse
In Mooney’s version, the story begins “long ago, when the world was new.” Seven boys spend all their time near the townhouse playing gatayû′stĭ. Mooney describes the game as rolling a stone wheel along the ground and sliding a curved stick after it to strike the wheel. Their mothers scold them because the boys are neglecting the cornfield. When scolding fails, the mothers boil gatayû′stĭ stones in the pot with the corn and serve them to the hungry boys as a lesson.
The rebuke is sharp. The mothers tell the boys that if they like gatayû′stĭ better than the cornfield, they can eat the stones for dinner. The boys become angry and return to the townhouse. There they say they will go where they will never trouble their mothers again. Then they begin to dance around the townhouse, praying to the spirits for help. Some versions, Mooney notes, identify the dance as the Feather dance.
As the boys circle, their feet lift from the ground. With every round they rise higher. Their mothers rush out in fear, but most of the boys are already above the roof of the townhouse. One mother manages to pull her son down with the gatayû′stĭ pole, but he strikes the ground so hard that he sinks into it and the earth closes over him. The other six continue upward until they become the Pleiades.
The Boy Beneath the Pine
The most haunting part of the story is not only the rising of the six boys, but the fate of the seventh. In Mooney’s version, the people grieve for the lost children. The mother of the boy who went into the ground comes every morning and evening to cry over the place where he disappeared. Her tears dampen the earth. At last a green shoot rises. It grows day after day until it becomes the pine.
Mooney’s final line gives the story its deeper meaning. The pine, he wrote, is “of the same nature as the stars” and holds the same bright light. The tree is not just a memorial. It is kin to the sky. The boy who did not remain among the stars still becomes part of the living world, rooted in the earth and shining in another form.
That image gives the story its Appalachian force. Anyone who has walked through pine woods after rain knows the way a pine can seem dark from a distance and bright up close, holding light in needles, resin, and bark. In this Cherokee tradition, the mountain tree and the winter stars belong to the same story.
A Well Known Story With Named Informants
Mooney did not present the story as a stray tale heard once. In his notes, he wrote that the myth was well known in the tribe and had been told in nearly the same form by Swimmer, Ta′gwadihĭ′, and Suyeta. He also connected the Feather dance with the Eagle dance and noted a related variant recorded by Stansbury Hagar in which the boys spend their time shooting at cornstalks.
Swimmer, whose Cherokee name Mooney gave as Aʻyûñ′inĭ, was one of Mooney’s major Cherokee sources. Ta′gwadihĭ′ also appears among the named figures in Mooney’s work. The survival of named informants does not remove the problems of outsider ethnography, but it does help modern readers avoid treating the story as anonymous decoration. It came through Cherokee tellers, through specific fieldwork, and through a printed record that should be read critically and respectfully.
Hagar’s Cherokee Star Lore
Stansbury Hagar’s “Cherokee Star-Lore,” published in the Boas Anniversary Volume in 1906, gives another important version and a broader star lore setting. Hagar said his notes were collected among the North Carolina Cherokee in 1898 and thanked James Mooney for correcting Cherokee words.
Hagar wrote that the Pleiades were known to the Cherokee as Unadatsugi, “the Group,” and Anitsiutsa, “the Boys.” In his version, seven boys practice shooting bows and arrows at bundles of corncobs until their mothers tell them to go elsewhere if they must keep shooting at things not fit to eat. The boys disappear around a hill. When their parents find them, they are dancing the feather dance in a circle to the sound of an ancient drum. As they dance, they begin to rise into the air.
Hagar’s version adds details not found in the same way in Mooney’s printed story. The boys become the Seven Stars of the Pleiades, and the drum becomes the nebula near one of the stars. Hagar also connects the Pleiades with seasonal observation, writing that the Cherokee used the position of the Pleiades to reckon years and seasons, including planting time and the falling of leaves.
Those details make the story more than a charming explanation of a constellation. In Hagar’s account, the Pleiades have ceremonial and agricultural meaning. They are connected with dance, weather, crops, and the yearly rhythm of Cherokee life.
The Olbrechts and Kilpatrick Version
Another version appears in Eastern Cherokee Folktales, reconstructed by Jack Frederick Kilpatrick and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick from the field notes of Frans M. Olbrechts. The Smithsonian record identifies the work as a 1966 Bureau of American Ethnology publication based on Olbrechts’s notes. The introduction says the notes came from sessions at Big Cove on the Eastern Cherokee Reservation in January and February 1927 with Will West Long and Morgan Calhoun.
This version, titled “The Origin of the Pleiades,” is short but important. It says there were seven boys who played inside the ga:dhi all day. They had a drum and danced the Eagle Dance. While dancing, they noticed they were rising into the air. Near the Seven Stars, the story says, is a small eighth one, which is the drum the boys used. A footnote calls this a synoptic version of the myth told in Mooney.
That shorter version confirms how stable the main image remained across records. Boys gather. They play or dance. They rise. The Pleiades remain in the sky, but something small beside them preserves the memory of the drum, the dance, or the one who did not fully remain with the others.
Seven in Cherokee Memory
The number seven is central to the story. It is also central to broader Cherokee symbolism. The Cherokee Nation’s 2016 Annual Report states that in Cherokee traditional belief, seven is the most sacred number, appearing repeatedly in stories and ceremonies. The same report discusses the seven clans, seven directions, and the seven pointed star in the Cherokee Nation seal before summarizing the story of seven Cherokee boys who rose into the sky.
In that modern Cherokee Nation summary, six of the boys become the Pleiades, while the seventh is caught by his mother, falls to the ground, sinks into the earth, and eventually has a pine tree grow over his resting place. This official modern retelling does not replace Mooney, Hagar, or Olbrechts, but it shows that the story continues to have cultural presence.
The Cherokee Nation language material on Origin of Pleiades and the Pine also gives the story educational life through syllabary, vocabulary, and translation. Its glossary includes Cherokee words for boys, star, mother, pine, rock, corn, dancing, falling, flying, and wheel, and its translation begins with seven boys spending their time by the townhouse playing with a stone wheel.
Cornfields, Games, and Responsibility
One reason the story feels so old is that it is built from ordinary life. The boys are not kings or warriors. They are children at play. The mothers are not villains. They are trying to bring their sons back to work and food. The cornfield stands behind the whole story as a reminder that play, ceremony, and survival were not separate things.
The gatayû′stĭ game in Mooney’s version is also important. It resembles the broader Southeastern game often called chunkey, in which a stone disk or wheel was rolled and players cast or slid sticks toward it. In the story, the game becomes a sign of disorder because the boys choose it over the cornfield. Yet the same circular motion of game and dance becomes the motion that lifts them into the sky.
That is what gives the story its tension. It is partly about disobedience and grief, but it is not only a warning against play. The boys become stars. The seventh becomes a pine. The mother’s sorrow brings life out of the ground. The story moves between discipline and wonder, between loss and transformation.
A Story of Sky and Place
The Pleiades and the Pine is especially useful for Appalachian history because it places the sky inside a lived mountain world. The stars are not separated from townhouses, fields, games, mothers, dances, and trees. The sky is not distant from Appalachia. It bends down into it.
Rodning’s work helps explain why the townhouse matters in that setting. Cherokee townhouses were not just buildings. They were public landmarks where community identity, memory, and public life gathered. In a story where children circle the townhouse and rise into the sky, the center of the town becomes a point between earth and heaven.
The pine matters just as much. It roots the story in the soil. Six boys become visible above. One remains below, changed into a tree that still holds the nature of the stars. In that image, Cherokee star lore does not ask the reader to choose between earth and sky. It joins them.
Why the Pleiades and the Pine Still Matters
The safest way to tell this story today is with humility. It should be presented as Cherokee tradition preserved in specific historical records, not as a single universal Cherokee belief and not as a generic Indigenous legend. The strongest sources are Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee, Hagar’s “Cherokee Star-Lore,” the Olbrechts and Kilpatrick Eastern Cherokee Folktales, and modern Cherokee Nation educational materials. Together, they show a tradition with several forms but a recognizable heart.
That heart is simple and powerful. Seven boys leave the world of their mothers, their games, and their cornfields. Six become the Pleiades. One falls back to earth and becomes the pine. The mother’s tears water the ground. The tree grows upward, carrying the same brightness as the stars.
For Appalachian readers, the story is a reminder that the old Cherokee world of the southern mountains was filled with meaning from the ground to the sky. A townhouse could stand at the center of a town. A cornfield could teach responsibility. A child’s game could become a path upward. A mother’s grief could become a pine. And on a clear night, the stars above the ridges could still be remembered as The Boys.
Sources & Further Reading
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Bureau of American Ethnology, Nineteenth Annual Report. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45634/45634-h/45634-h.htm
Hagar, Stansbury. “Cherokee Star-Lore.” In Boas Anniversary Volume: Anthropological Papers Written in Honor of Franz Boas, 354–366. New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1906. https://archive.org/stream/boasanniversary00laufgoog/boasanniversary00laufgoog_djvu.txt
Kilpatrick, Jack Frederick, and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick. “Eastern Cherokee Folktales: Reconstructed from the Field Notes of Frans M. Olbrechts.” Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 196, Anthropological Paper No. 80. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1966. https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/22141/bae_bulletin_196_1966_80_379-447.pdf
Cherokee Nation. Origin of Pleiades and the Pine. Tahlequah, OK: Cherokee Nation Language Department and Education Services. https://language.cherokee.org/media/s0kbyept/4-origin-of-pleiades-and-the-pine.pdf
Cherokee Nation. 2016 Annual Report to the Cherokee People. Tahlequah, OK: Cherokee Nation, 2016. https://www.cherokee.org/media/3drkwtfj/2016-ar-final.pdf
Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives. Guide to the James Mooney Collection, 1849–1980, Bulk 1887–1921. https://sova.si.edu/record/naa.1992-34
Wahnenauhi. “The Wahnenauhi Manuscript: Historical Sketches of the Cherokees, Together with Some of Their Customs, Traditions, and Superstitions.” Edited by Jack Frederick Kilpatrick. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 196, Anthropological Paper No. 77. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1966. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/22138
Newberry Library. John Howard Payne Papers, 1794–1841. Modern Manuscripts and Archives. https://archives.newberry.org/repositories/2/resources/762
Squier, E. G. The Serpent Symbol, and the Worship of the Reciprocal Principles of Nature in America. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1851. https://archive.org/details/serpentsymbolwor00squi
Rodning, Christopher B. Center Places and Cherokee Towns: Archaeological Perspectives on Native American Architecture and Landscape in the Southern Appalachians. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817359805/center-places-and-cherokee-towns/
Rodning, Christopher B. “Mounds, Myths, and Cherokee Townhouses in Southwestern North Carolina.” American Antiquity 74, no. 4 (2009): 627–663. https://www2.tulane.edu/~crodning/rodning2009A.pdf
Irwin, Lee. “Cherokee Healing: Myth, Dreams, and Medicine.” American Indian Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1992): 237–257. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1185431
Gibbon, William B. “Asiatic Parallels in North American Star Lore: Milky Way, Pleiades, Orion.” Journal of American Folklore 77, no. 305 (1964): 236–250. https://www.jstor.org/stable/537822
Smallwood, Josh. “The Boys: A Cherokee Story of The Pleiades.” Chumash Science Through Time, April 17, 2023. https://chumashscience.com/2023/04/17/the-boys-a-cherokee-story-of-the-pleiades/
Native History Association. “Origin of the Pleiades and the Pine.” https://nativehistoryassociation.org/pleiades.php
Native History Association. “Cherokee Stories.” https://www.nativehistoryassociation.org/cherokee_stories.php
United South and Eastern Tribes Sovereignty Protection Fund. “Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.” September 23, 2021. https://www.usetinc.org/nahm/ebci/
Blue Ridge National Heritage Area. “Cherokee Qualla Boundary.” https://blueridgeheritagetrail.com/explore-a-trail-of-heritage-treasures/qualla-boundary/
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “NASA’s TESS Spacecraft Triples Size of Pleiades Star Cluster.” NASA Science. https://science.nasa.gov/missions/tess/nasas-tess-spacecraft-triples-size-of-pleiades-star-cluster/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: This article treats the Pleiades and the Pine as a recorded Cherokee tradition preserved through named sources, not as a generic Native American legend. Readers should approach the story with respect for Cherokee cultural memory, language, and the southern Appalachian places where these traditions were recorded.