Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Great Frog That Swallows the Sun: Walosi and the Cherokee Eclipse Tradition
The sun did not vanish all at once. Its bright circle slowly narrowed as something unseen appeared to bite into its edge. Shadows sharpened, birds quieted, and the familiar warmth of daylight began to leave the valleys. During a total eclipse, the mountains could pass from afternoon into an unnatural twilight within minutes.
In the Cherokee eclipse tradition, this was the work of a great frog. Walosi had found the sun and was trying to swallow it.
The danger could not be ignored. People gathered outside, shouted, beat drums, struck objects together, and made as much noise as they could. In later generations, guns and firecrackers joined the older sounds. The purpose was to frighten the frog until it released the sun and allowed light to return.
The story survived in written records, Cherokee language materials, family storytelling, and public celebrations on the Qualla Boundary. It is one of the clearest examples of an Appalachian Indigenous tradition that can be followed from an eighteenth-century eyewitness account into the present.
The Great Frog and the Cherokee Little People
The Great Frog should not be confused with the Yûñwĭ Tsunsdi, commonly translated as the Cherokee Little People. They belong to separate bodies of Cherokee tradition.
The Little People are described in stories connected with mountains, caves, rivers, hunting, music, medicine, warnings, and encounters with human beings. Walosi, in the eclipse tradition, is a great frog associated with the disappearance of the sun or moon.
James Mooney treated the Little People and the eclipse frog separately in his collection of Cherokee traditions. Combining them may create an interesting modern creature story, but it does not accurately reflect the historical sources. The Great Frog is best understood as part of Cherokee celestial tradition rather than as one of the Little People.
The Cherokee Eclipse of 1736
The earliest known written account connected with the tradition comes from James Adair, an eighteenth-century trader who lived for many years among Indigenous nations of the Southeast.
Adair wrote that he was among the Cherokee during a lunar eclipse in 1736. As the moon darkened, the people around him began running in different directions, firing guns, shouting, beating kettles, and ringing horse bells. The tremendous noise continued while the eclipse remained visible.
Adair believed that the people were trying to help the “suffering moon.” Whatever details he failed to understand, his account establishes that Cherokee people were responding to an eclipse with organized noise by the first half of the eighteenth century.
The scene is one of the most vivid descriptions in Adair’s book. A darkened moon hung over the Cherokee country while gunfire, metal kettles, bells, and human voices echoed through the settlement. The event was not treated as a passive spectacle. The community answered the darkness.
What James Adair Did Not Say
Adair’s account must be read carefully.
Immediately after describing the Cherokee eclipse response, he discussed a belief that eclipses were caused by a monster resembling a bullfrog. Modern retellings sometimes combine the two statements and claim that Adair directly recorded Cherokee people saying that a frog was attacking the moon in 1736.
That is not exactly what he wrote.
Adair attributed the bullfrog explanation to what he called “East-Indians,” a term he used for peoples in Asia. He did not clearly state that the Cherokee people around him had explained their own actions in those words.
His account remains important because it documents the noise-making tradition in 1736, but it cannot stand alone as proof that the people present explicitly named a frog. That connection appears much more clearly in later Cherokee material preserved by James Mooney.
The distinction matters because historical folklore is often changed by repetition. Once two nearby passages are combined, an uncertain interpretation can become accepted as an eyewitness statement. Adair saw the Cherokee response to the eclipse. Mooney recorded the Great Frog explanation. Both sources are valuable, but they tell different parts of the story.
James Mooney and the Great Frog
More than a century after Adair’s eclipse, ethnographer James Mooney began extensive work with Cherokee speakers, storytellers, doctors, and community members. He collected much of the material that became Myths of the Cherokee during field seasons from 1887 through 1890.
Mooney recorded the eclipse tradition directly. When the sun or moon became dark, he wrote, it was because a great frog in the sky was trying to swallow it. People once gathered, fired guns, and beat drums until the noise frightened the frog away and the light returned.
Elsewhere in the same work, Mooney stated that a solar eclipse was believed to result from a great frog attempting to swallow the sun. Loud noises were made to drive it away.
Unlike Adair’s account, Mooney’s record explicitly connects the frog, the eclipse, and the communal response. His work therefore provides the strongest early published source for the Great Frog tradition.
“The Frog Is Swallowing the Sun or Moon”
Mooney also preserved a Cherokee expression for the event:
nûñdă′ walâ′sĭ u′giskă′
He translated the expression as “the frog is swallowing the sun or moon.”
Cherokee spelling and transliteration systems have changed since Mooney’s time, and modern materials may present the words differently. The frog is commonly identified as walosi, written ᏩᎶᏏ in the Cherokee syllabary.
The language is important because it places the frog inside the description of the eclipse itself. The expression does not merely describe an animal appearing in a story told after the event. It describes what is happening in the sky. The sun or moon is disappearing because the frog is swallowing it.
More Than One Cherokee Expression for an Eclipse
The Great Frog expression was not necessarily the only Cherokee way to describe an eclipse.
A Cherokee almanac prepared for 1838 used an expression commonly rendered as Nvdo tsulisihvsgiyi, meaning approximately “the time when the sun or moon becomes dark.” The almanac was produced within the nineteenth-century Cherokee print world associated with the Park Hill Mission press.
The difference between the expressions is revealing. One describes the event through the action of the frog. The other describes the visible darkening of the sun or moon.
It would be speculative to claim that the missionary setting deliberately removed the Great Frog from the almanac. Cherokee speakers may simply have possessed several ways to describe the same celestial event, just as people today may speak of an eclipse scientifically, poetically, or through inherited cultural stories.
The printed almanac also shows that Cherokee engagement with astronomy did not end when older traditions encountered missionary education and European astronomical tables. Cherokee readers could use printed calculations while continuing to preserve stories about the living relationships between people, animals, the earth, and the sky.
A Sky Filled With Living Beings
The Great Frog belongs to a larger Cherokee world in which the sun, moon, thunder, rivers, animals, mountains, and forces of weather were not merely lifeless objects.
Mooney’s collections contain stories about the sun and moon, the Thunderers, great serpents, animal councils, spirit beings, and places where the ordinary world touched something more powerful. These traditions joined observations of nature with teachings about behavior, responsibility, danger, healing, and balance.
An eclipse was especially dramatic because it disrupted one of the most dependable patterns in human life. The sun rose, crossed the sky, and disappeared at night. The moon changed shape according to a recognizable cycle. An eclipse interrupted those patterns without warning for anyone who did not possess a printed calendar predicting it.
The Great Frog gave that disruption a living form. Darkness was not an empty absence. Something was happening, and the people could respond.
Frightening Walosi Away
Noise stands at the center of the tradition.
Adair heard guns, voices, kettles, and horse bells in 1736. Mooney later recorded guns and drums. Cherokee Nation citizen Roy Boney described people banging rocks together, shaking shells, and shouting. As new objects entered Cherokee communities, guns and firecrackers were added to the older methods.
The changing instruments show how a tradition can adapt without losing its central action. A stone struck against another stone and a gun fired into the air are very different technologies, but both serve the same purpose within the story. They tell Walosi that the people have seen what is happening and will not allow the sun or moon to disappear without a struggle.
The response is communal. One person might make noise, but a settlement acting together could produce a roar capable of reaching the sky. The eclipse therefore became a moment when the community joined in a single purpose.
The Sun Returns
From a modern astronomical perspective, the eclipse ends because the moon continues moving along its orbit. From inside the Great Frog story, the return of light proves that the people’s actions succeeded.
The frog loosens its grip. The sun begins to emerge. Warmth returns, shadows soften, and the normal sounds of the world slowly resume.
This ending gives the story unusual power. It can be reenacted whenever an eclipse appears, and the result can be seen by everyone present. The people make noise, the frog retreats, and the sun comes back.
That pattern does not require the story to compete with astronomy. A person can understand the movement of the earth, moon, and sun while also participating in a cultural tradition that connects the event to language, ancestors, community, and place.
The Great Frog on the Qualla Boundary
On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse crossed the mountains of western North Carolina. The path of totality passed over Cherokee and the Qualla Boundary, providing an opportunity for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to bring the Great Frog tradition into a large public gathering.
At the Cherokee Indian Fairgrounds, tribal storytellers shared the eclipse story as visitors waited for the sky to darken. Mike Crowe of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian described the frog rising from the underworld and slowly taking bites from the sun. In the old story, people answered by beating drums and making loud noises.
As totality approached, the temperature fell and daylight faded. Drumming and shouting rose from the fairgrounds. When the sun became completely covered, the crowd joined together in a tremendous burst of noise.
For less than three minutes, day became night over the Qualla Boundary. Then the sun returned.
The event was both a modern eclipse festival and a continuation of Cherokee storytelling. The gathering included visitors, vendors, music, and eclipse glasses, but its central cultural image was the same Great Frog that Mooney had written about more than a century earlier.
A Story Still Told in Cherokee
The survival of the tradition is not limited to newspaper articles or tourist events.
Cherokee Nation citizen Roy Boney recorded the story in both Cherokee and English under the title “Frog Swallows the Sun: A Cherokee Eclipse Story.” The recording allows listeners to hear the tradition in the language from which Mooney attempted to preserve his nineteenth-century translation.
The Cherokee Nation Language Department also distributes a children’s book titled Frog Eats the Sun, created by David Crawler, Jeff Edwards, and Zachary Barnes. Its presence among Cherokee-language learning materials demonstrates that the Great Frog remains part of contemporary cultural education.
These modern sources are especially important because early written accounts were usually produced by outsiders. Adair was a colonial trader. Mooney was a government ethnographer. Their records preserve valuable information, but neither man owned the tradition he described.
Contemporary Cherokee storytellers, artists, teachers, language workers, and tribal publications return authority to Cherokee voices. They show that Walosi is not simply a creature trapped in an old anthropology book. The Great Frog remains part of a living story.
Tradition Across Cherokee Communities
The Great Frog appears today among Cherokee communities separated by geography and history.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians preserved and publicly enacted the story in the ancestral Cherokee homeland of western North Carolina. Cherokee Nation language educators and citizens have continued telling and publishing the story in Oklahoma.
That continuity is significant. Removal divided families, communities, political institutions, and geographical relationships. Many Cherokee people were forced west, while the ancestors of the Eastern Band remained in the southern Appalachian Mountains.
The continued presence of the Great Frog tradition in both regions does not mean that every version is identical. Oral traditions naturally develop local details, different tellings, and new forms of presentation. What remains recognizable is the central image of the frog swallowing the light and the people joining together to drive it away.
Folklore, History, and Respect
The Great Frog is often introduced as a charming explanation created before people understood astronomy. That description is too simple.
Traditional stories do more than explain physical events. They preserve language, teach relationships, organize communal responses, connect generations, and place natural events within a moral and cultural world.
Reducing the story to an incorrect scientific theory misses much of what made it last. The most important question is not whether a frog physically swallowed the sun. It is why generations continued to tell the story, why people acted together during an eclipse, and why Cherokee educators and storytellers still consider it worth preserving.
The historical record also warns against treating all Cherokee beliefs as interchangeable. The Great Frog is not one of the Little People. Adair did not clearly attribute his bullfrog passage to the Cherokee. Mooney’s spelling reflects the conventions of his own period. Modern Cherokee communities are not museum exhibits repeating a perfectly frozen ancient script.
Respectful folklore history depends upon keeping those distinctions visible.
Why the Great Frog Matters
Walosi stands at the meeting place of Cherokee history, Appalachian tradition, astronomy, language, and community memory.
The written trail begins with the sounds Adair heard during the lunar eclipse of 1736. It becomes explicit in Mooney’s account of the great frog attempting to swallow the sun or moon. It continues through Cherokee-language expressions, modern storytelling, children’s books, tribal journalism, and the drums that sounded across the Qualla Boundary during the eclipse of 2017.
Few Appalachian folklore traditions can be traced across so many different kinds of evidence.
The story also carries a simple but enduring image. When darkness threatened the world, the people did not remain silent. They gathered together and raised their voices until the light returned.
Sources & Further Reading
Adair, James. The History of the American Indians; Particularly Those Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1775. https://archive.org/details/GR_10
Adair, James. The History of the American Indians: A Critical Edition. Edited by Kathryn E. Holland Braund. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817380786/the-history-of-the-american-indians/
Mooney, James. “Myths of the Cherokee.” In Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897–1898, part 1, 3–548. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/91694
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Project Gutenberg. Accessed August 1, 2026. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45634
National Anthropological Archives. “James Mooney Collection, 1849–1980, Bulk 1887–1921.” Smithsonian Institution. Accessed August 1, 2026. https://sova.si.edu/record/naa.1992-34
Mooney, James. “‘Myths of the Cherokee,’ 1900.” Typescript drafts with handwritten corrections, box 41, folder 4, James Mooney Collection, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. https://www.si.edu/object/archives/components/sova-naa-1992-34-ref45
Mooney, James. “Cherokee Stories.” Notebook, MS 1905, box 1, folder 4, James Mooney Collection, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. https://collections.si.edu/search/detail/ead_component%3Asova-naa-1992-34-ref75
Mooney, James. MS 1876 Cherokee Myths. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed August 1, 2026. https://sirismm.si.edu/EADpdfs/NAA.MS1876.pdf
Cherokee Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1838, Fitted to the Meridian of Fort Gibson. Park Hill, Cherokee Nation: Mission Press, 1837. Discussed and reproduced by Your Grandmother’s Cherokee. https://www.yourgrandmotherscherokee.com/blog/category/cherokee-almanac
Cherokee Almanac, for the Year of Our Lord 1839. Park Hill, Cherokee Nation: Mission Press, 1838. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. https://www.si.edu/object/cherokee-almanac-year-our-lord%3Asiris_sil_768316
Crawler, David, Jeff Edwards, and Zachary Barnes. Frog Eats the Sun. Cherokee Nation Language Department, 2019. https://language.cherokee.org/learning-materials/children-s-books/?page=3&pageSize=7&term=
Boney, Roy Jr. “Frog Swallows the Sun: A Cherokee Eclipse Story.” Cherokee and English-language video posted by Rachel Tso. Vimeo, 2017. https://vimeo.com/230361737
Bark, Lindsey. “Tribal Lore, Beliefs Surround Rare Eclipse Event.” Cherokee Phoenix, March 30, 2024. https://www.cherokeephoenix.org/culture/tribal-lore-beliefs-surround-rare-eclipse-event/article_5e392916-ed3c-11ee-bfa5-5b5d941d659b.html
McKie, Scott B. P. “Cherokee Watches Frog Swallow the Sun.” Cherokee One Feather, August 21, 2017. https://theonefeather.com/2017/08/21/cherokee-watches-frog-swallow-the-sun/
Eldridge, Davin. “In the Shadow of the Eclipse, Cherokee Legends Are Told.” BPR News, August 18, 2017. https://www.bpr.org/news/2017-08-18/in-the-shadow-of-the-eclipse-cherokee-legends-are-told
Eldridge, Davin. “Cherokee Legends Come to Life at Cultural Eclipse Celebration.” BPR News, August 22, 2017. https://www.bpr.org/news/2017-08-22/cherokee-legends-come-to-life-at-cultural-eclipse-celebration
WUNC. “To the Moon and Back: Your Guide to the 2017 Solar Eclipse in North Carolina.” The State of Things, August 17, 2017. https://www.wunc.org/show/the-state-of-things/2017-08-17/to-the-moon-and-back-your-guide-to-the-2017-solar-eclipse-in-nc
Johnson, Becky. “Saving the Sun: A Cherokee Eclipse Tradition.” Smoky Mountain Living, June 1, 2017. https://www.smliv.com/stories/saving-the-sun/
Benallie, Kalle. “Eclipses Have Special Ties to Indigenous Peoples.” ICT, April 5, 2024. https://ictnews.org/news/eclipses-have-special-ties-to-indigenous-peoples/
National Museum of the American Indian. “What Indigenous Americans Believe about Eclipses.” Smithsonian Magazine, April 5, 2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2024/04/05/indigenous-americans-believe-about-eclipses/
Hall, Stephanie. “Solar Eclipse: A Moment of Awe, Wonder, and Belief.” Folklife Today, Library of Congress, August 16, 2017. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/08/solar-eclipse-awe-wonder-and-belief/
Fraser, Gordon. “Cherokee Astronomy.” In Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America, 78–105. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. https://www.pennpress.org/9780812252927/star-territory/
Wassén, Henry. “The Frog in Indian Mythology and Imaginative World.” Anthropos 29, nos. 5–6 (1934): 613–658. https://www.samorini.it/doc1/alt_aut/sz/wassen04.pdf
Hughes, Art. “Tribal Traditions and the Eclipse.” Native America Calling, October 13, 2023. https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/friday-october-13-2023-tribal-traditions-and-the-eclipse/
Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. “Our Community.” Accessed August 1, 2026. https://phhs.ebci-nsn.gov/our-community/
Author Note: This article approaches Walosi as a living Cherokee eclipse tradition rather than reducing it to a simple monster story. Because the earliest written accounts came through outside observers, I have separated what James Adair witnessed from what James Mooney later documented explicitly while keeping modern Cherokee voices at the center.