The Moonlit Road - Chief Sawnee's Gold

Written by Craig Dominey and Lanny Gilbert

Bill Morgan and Tom Edwards sat nursing their umpteenth beers in Fat Daddy's Saloon, a loud, smoke-filled, neon-lit honky tonk in the foothills of the North Georgia mountains. Fat Daddy's had always been their bar of choice on the weekends, but ever since Bill and Tom lost their jobs at the bottling plant, they were there almost every night, drinking away the last dollars they had.

If you hung out in Fat Daddy's long enough, the same things would happen every night like clockwork. The phone behind the bar would ring precisely at seven, as Mrs. Floyd would call making sure her husband hadn't snuck over there after work. At eight-thirty, Little Jake would lose yet another pool game to Mike "The Mouth" Kilbey, and he'd hear about it the rest of the night. At nine-thirty, someone would play "Whisky River" on the beat-up old jukebox.

And at ten o'clock, sitting alone at the end of the bar, Chief "B.S." would tell his tired old tale of the gold in Sawnee Mountain to anyone who would listen.

Pool room

Now, some of you young folks may not know what "B.S." stands for, but you older folks surely do. Bill gave the Chief that name because he got tired of hearing the same old stories coming out of his mouth. The Chief was an old Cherokee with long grey hair, wrinkled, leathery skin, piercing eyes, and a beaten up hat with some sort of turkey feather sticking out of the brim. His ancestors had lived and hunted in the North Georgia mountains long before the white man arrived. And he knew those mountains so well that he could hike through them blindfolded if he had to.

That didn't matter much to the good ol' boys at Fat Daddy's, who considered the Chief a weird outsider. But maybe it was their dire employment situation that led Bill and Tom to suddenly pay attention to the Chief as he told his story to another unsuspecting drunk.

He always started his tale by talking about the Trail of Tears, and how Chief Sawnee, one of the most respected Cherokee leaders in Georgia, refused to go. Instead, Chief Sawnee hid in the North Georgia mountains with his loyal braves, and when he died he was buried in the mountain which now bears his name. According to the story, he was also buried with a large stash of gold coins, which his remaining braves buried with him.

This was the part of the story where everyone in the bar would laugh at the old man and tell him he was nuts. "It's true," the Chief insisted, "The gold is buried with Chief Sawneee deep in Sawnee Mountain. But it's protected by his spirit. I can tell you how to get there, but I'd never go in myself. I don't need gold bad enough to have a ghost hounding me for the rest of my life."

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