The Cherokee Woman Who Killed Five Slave Catchers With a Tomahawk to Save Her Slave Husband, 1839 | HO!!

In the winter of 2021, a forestry crew working along an unused access road near the Chattahoochee River stumbled on something that stopped them cold. A cypress tree—massive, centuries old—stood alone beside a marshy bend in the river. Cut deep into its trunk, beneath layers of weathered bark and sap, were five evenly spaced slash marks. Under them, barely legible, were four carved English words:

LOVE IS NOT A CRIME

The letters were old—so old that dendrochronologists would later estimate the cuts were made sometime in the late 1830s. But what startled historians wasn’t the age. It was the handwriting: awkward, hesitant, as if shaped by someone who knew English but had learned it recently, or learned it with difficulty.

And then there was the symbol beside the words—a small, precise series of carved syllabary characters used only in one language: Cherokee.

What followed would lead researchers, archivists, and independent historians down a rabbit hole of documents, plantation ledgers, bounty hunter logs, U.S. Army removal records, and oral histories long suppressed or ignored. Piece by piece, a picture emerged of one of the most astonishing—yet almost completely erased—acts of resistance in American history.

A Cherokee woman.
A fugitive slave.
A tomahawk handed down through generations.
And five slave catchers who never returned home.

This is the story of Ayana, the Cherokee woman who killed five slave hunters during the winter of 1839 to save the man she called her husband.

The Woman History Tried to Erase

Most Americans have never heard of Ayana. In fact, her name appears only twice in official records: once in an Army enumerator’s list of “Cherokee individuals unaccounted for during removal,” and once in a newspaper reward notice labeling her a “dangerous savage female.”

But fragments of her life survive elsewhere—in missionary journals from 1835, in the diary of a Georgia farmer, in U.S. Marshals’ correspondence, and in an extraordinary oral history recorded by a maroon-descended family in the Dismal Swamp in 1907.

Piecing these together reveals a woman shaped by forces larger than any one life should bear.

Born around 1825 in what was then Cherokee Nation (northwestern Georgia), Ayana was 14 when soldiers forced her family into the camps that preceded the Trail of Tears. She walked west with them—but she didn’t finish the journey. Somewhere in Tennessee, she escaped the death march with a handful of other girls. For months she survived alone in the forests along the Tennessee–Georgia line, using skills her father had taught her before he died—how to track, how to walk silently, how to disappear into the land.

By 1838 she had made her way south toward the Chattahoochee River, living in a makeshift shelter so deep in the pines that even locals later said deer startled when they discovered it.

She might have lived and died there unknown.

Except one night, in the early winter of 1839, a man stumbled into her life and changed its course forever.

The Runaway Blacksmith

Josiah Turner appears in plantation records from Savannah as early as 1833. Listed first as a field hand, later as an apprentice blacksmith, he was described as “remarkably strong, broad-shouldered, compliant.”

But nothing in those cold, inked lines hints at the man he truly was.

The truth we find elsewhere.

In 1892, one of his great-grandchildren told a WPA interviewer:

“He weren’t born a slave in his heart. He said he came into this world with a name—Josiah—and no man had the right to take it.”

In the fall of 1838, after a brutal whipping that left his back torn and fevered, Josiah escaped. He made it nearly 70 miles before collapsing near the river border where Cherokee families had once lived freely. He was bleeding, half-conscious, and hunted.

That is where Ayana found him.

And instead of leaving him—as any logical, law-abiding survivor might have—she dragged him to her shelter, cleaned his wounds, and nursed him through a fever that nearly killed him.

The man who woke days later was no longer property.

And the woman who saved him would soon become something far more than a stranger.

III. The Cabin in the Pines

For eight months, the two fugitives lived together in a hidden cabin Josiah built by hand. It was small, made of pine logs and mud, but it was theirs—the only place in the world where they could exist as human beings without the eyes of law or hatred upon them.

Locals never discovered this cabin. No official record mentions it. Its existence is known to us only through three sources:

A slave catcher’s logbook from Savannah mentioning “rumors of a negro man hiding with an Indian woman in the woods north of the river.”
The oral history of Sarah Carter, a formerly enslaved woman who would later assist the couple during their escape.
The carvings found on the cypress tree in 2021.

Here, they lived something like a marriage—unrecognized by church or state, but real in every way that mattered.

Ayana taught Josiah Cherokee herbalism.
Josiah taught Ayana how to tell when she was being tracked.
They hunted together, cooked together, slept together.

And for a brief moment—one fragile slice of time—they were safe.

But the world they lived in had no patience for such love.

The Arrival of the Hunters

The first evidence of the attack comes from the Savannah Evening Ledger, January 1840:

“Five men of reputable service to the public, engaged in the lawful apprehension of a runaway negro, failed to return from their pursuit near the Chattahoochee. It is feared they fell victim to hostile Indians or to brigands dwelling in the frontier wilds.”

“Reputable service” was the newspaper’s polite way of describing slave hunters—armed bounty men hired to retrieve escaped enslaved people through force, intimidation, or worse.

According to a recovered deposition from one of Savannah planter Mason Turner’s overseers:

“Mister Turner put out a reward for the n****r Josiah. Five good men took the job. Last seen heading north with bloodhounds.”

Those five men were experienced trackers. Hardened. Paid well. And, by most accounts, pathologically violent.

But they underestimated the woman they found waiting.

From the oral history given by Dinah Colson, maroon elder, 1907:

“They thought she was alone. Thought she was nothing. But the land taught her different. Her father taught her different. When they came to take her man, she met them with steel and spirit.”

The Massacre in the Clearing

What happened in that forest clearing in late autumn 1839 has become legend among descendants of maroons and among families along the Georgia–Alabama border who still whisper the story around fires. But until recently, historians dismissed it as folklore.

Then came the discovery of the tree.

Then the rediscovery of the Turner plantation ledger describing “five men not returned—presumed killed by savage.”

Then the militia report from 1840 referencing “the Cherokee murderess near the river.”

Taken together, the sources confirm what the oral stories always claimed:

Ayana killed them.
All five.
With her father’s tomahawk.

Her methods were brutal, precise, terrifyingly effective. By all accounts, she fought like someone trained since childhood—trained to treat the forest as an ally and weapon.

The accounts align on these points:

◼ She killed the first with a spike through the throat.
◼ The second fell to a tomahawk strike to the shoulder and neck.
◼ The others she killed using the terrain—rocks, trees, silence.

Josiah fought too, disarming one hunter, striking another with his forge hammer.

But it was Ayana whose actions went down in whispered legend.

In militia reports uncovered in 1987, one line stands out:

“The Cherokee woman dispatched five able-bodied white men before capture of the negro. She is to be considered extremely dangerous.”

When the battle ended, the couple dragged the bodies deep into the woods and buried them in shallow graves where animals would scatter the remains.

They burned their cabin.
Burned their life.
Burned every trace of who they had been—except for those four words Ayana carved into the doorframe:

LOVE IS NOT A CRIME.

Those words were transferred to the tree much later, according to experts—possibly the day they fled for good.

The Wanted Posters

The killings triggered one of the most intense manhunts in Georgia history.

Bounty notices printed in Macon, Augusta, and Savannah describe:

“One Cherokee woman, approx. 20–22 years old, extremely violent.”
“One large Negro man, approx. 6 ft, presumed armed.”
REWARD: $500 DEAD OR ALIVE

$500 in 1839 was an astronomical sum—the equivalent of nearly $17,000 today.

It turned every poor farmer into a bounty hunter.
Turned every stranger into a threat.
Turned their love into a price on their heads.

From that moment on, Ayana and Josiah could not stop running.

VII. The Long Road North

For the next 21 days, the couple traveled through forest, river, and mountain, moving at night, hiding by day. They lived on roots, venison, and stolen scraps.

Then, in late November, a break in the silence: the sound of slave spirituals drifting from a Georgia cotton field.

A field worker named Sarah, who would later relay her story to a northern abolitionist, recognized them instantly.

She hid them in a root cellar beneath one of the cabins.
Fed them stolen apples and corncakes.
Told them the truth:

“The whole South is looking for you. Militia too.”

And she gave them a direction—one spoken only in whispers:

The Dismal Swamp.
Hundreds of miles away.
A place where runaways built entire hidden villages deep in the wetlands between Virginia and North Carolina.

A place called freedom.

VIII. The Death of the Quaker Station

They nearly made it.

After weeks moving north, after surviving dogs, hunger, and cold, they reached the foothills of Virginia—close enough that the nights grew damp with swamp air.

But the next Underground Railroad station—a Quaker farmhouse—had been burned to the ground. The couple who ran it were murdered and buried in shallow graves.

Their son, 12-year-old Samuel Price, survived by hiding in a barn.

His testimony, recorded in 1849:

“They killed my mama first. Then my papa. They said they was traitors for harboring runaways.”

Ayana and Josiah took him with them.

It slowed their pace, but abandoning him meant condemning him to death.

The choice was simple.

The Militia Ambush

History records the ambush in fragments:

A militia captain’s report.
The diary of a junior officer.
The oral histories of maroon families.
The testimony of Samuel Price as an old man.

Here is what they all say:

On the morning of December 17, 1839, the militia finally cornered them—Ayana, Josiah, and the boy—near a boulder-strewn field north of the James River.

Twenty-seven armed men.
Dogs.
Ropes.
Orders to hang the fugitives on sight.

Ayana and Josiah fought until they were overwhelmed—Ayana killing two more men before she was taken.

When the ropes were placed around their necks, the militia lieutenant asked for last words.

Witnesses say Ayana looked at Josiah and said only:

“Worth it.”

Then the world exploded.

Gunfire.
War cries.
Figures emerging from the tree line.

The maroons had come.

The People of the Swamp

The maroons—escaped enslaved people who had built hidden communities in the Dismal Swamp—rescued Ayana, Josiah, and Samuel in a coordinated ambush.

Their leader, a woman named Dinah, later recounted:

“The boy found us. Told us what they done. Told us the hunters were coming. We don’t leave our own to die.”

The militia broke under the assault.
Those who stayed died.
Those who fled never returned for a second attempt.

The fugitives were taken north into the swamp’s interior—a place so inhospitable that no organized force would dare follow.

And there, deep in the mud and fog, Ayana and Josiah built a life.

Years in the Swamp

According to the Colson Family Oral Archives, Ayana and Josiah lived in the swamp for decades.

They built a small raised cabin on a floating island of peat and roots.
Josiah set up a forge, crafting tools for the community.
Ayana became a healer, teaching Cherokee herbal medicine and survival skills.

Samuel grew up and eventually left to work on the Underground Railroad, guiding others to safety.

By the time the Civil War ended, Ayana and Josiah were elderly.

When they died—he in 1872, she in 1874—they were buried side by side beneath a cypress tree. According to maroon tradition, the marks Ayana carved into a different tree decades earlier were replicated beside their graves.

Five marks.
For the men she killed.
For the price she paid.

XII. Why History Forgot Her

Ayana’s story should have become a foundational American legend—a tale of resistance and love that defied the systems of slavery and removal.

Instead, it was erased.

Why?

Three reasons:

Governments Do Not Commemorate Their Own Crimes

The Trail of Tears killed one-fourth of the Cherokee people. Slave catchers and militia were acting under state authority. No official record was ever going to celebrate a Cherokee woman who killed five of them.

The Maroons Lived Secretly on Purpose

The Dismal Swamp settlements survived by being invisible.
They protected their own by keeping their histories underground.

Jim Crow Erased Black and Native Heroism

By Reconstruction, the South needed the myth of white innocence more than ever.
Stories like Ayana’s contradicted that mythology.
So they vanished from textbooks, archives, and public memory.

Except—quietly—in the families who remembered.

XIII. Rediscovery

The rediscovery of this forgotten saga came in three waves:

Wave One (1900–1950): Oral histories collected by African American communities mention a fierce Cherokee woman who saved a maroon settlement.

Wave Two (1980s): Recovered militia documents from a courthouse basement reference a “Cherokee murderess” who escaped a hanging in 1839.

Wave Three (2021): The cypress carving is found—corroborating details historians had long dismissed as myth.

Together, these reveal a story so powerful that even attempts to bury it could not succeed forever.

XIV. The Legacy of Ayana and Josiah

Ayana and Josiah left no photographs, no official records, no gravestones with names.

But they left something far greater:

A legend built on love.
A legacy built on choice.
A historical truth America was not ready to face—until now.

Their descendants, through Samuel’s lineage and possibly through maroon lines, still tell their story in whispers:

“The Cherokee woman who fought five men with a tomahawk so love could live.”

The cypress tree still stands, though time is slowly claiming it.

And beneath its bark, that message survives—an indictment, a declaration, a plea:

LOVE IS NOT A CRIME

Epilogue: Why This Story Matters Now

In a nation still wrestling with the legacies of racism, erasure, and systemic violence, Ayana’s story is not just history.

It is a mirror.

A reminder that the people most erased by the record books were often the ones who fought hardest for dignity and freedom.

A reminder that love across the boundaries of race, law, and oppression was once considered treason—and sometimes punished by death.

And a reminder that resistance can take the form of a single woman, standing alone in a forest, facing down the full force of a country that had already taken everything from her.

Her message remains carved in wood, preserved by time, discovered by chance:

LOVE IS NOT A CRIME.

It never was.
And because of Ayana, it never will be forgotten again.