FRANKLIN, N.C. - s4story -- The Town of Franklin signed the deed returning the Noquisiyi (Nikwasi) Mound to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, ending decades of separation between the tribe and one of its most sacred sites. The mound in Franklin was part of a Cherokee mother town hundreds of years before the United States existed. It is also where, on April 3, 1730, a ceremony was held that named a Cherokee war leader the Emperor of the Cherokee.

On April 3, 2026, the 296th anniversary of that ceremony, Wonderfilled publishes Emperor of the Cherokee by Stephen E. Dinehart IV, a 185,000-word novel tracing the consequences of that moment from 1687 to 1979, when the TVA's Tellico Dam submerged the last Cherokee Overhill towns under sixty feet of reservoir water.

The mound at Noquisiyi survived. The towns did not.

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THE CEREMONY AND THE NOVEL

The novel opens at Itsa'sa, the Cherokee Mother Town, in 1687. It follows Moytoy, a war leader who becomes the first and only Emperor of the Cherokee, from birth through death and across three centuries of consequence. The title had no Cherokee equivalent and no Cherokee authority behind it. At the ceremony on the mound at Noquisiyi, Sir Alexander Cuming, a bankrupt Scottish baronet with forged letters of authority, placed a crown on Moytoy's head that the Cherokee had no word for. It was a collar, not a crown.

THE MOUND IN FRANKLIN

The Noquisiyi Mound, known in the colonial record as Nikwasi, is the site of the 1730 ceremony at the center of the novel. It is where Aganunitsi, the novel's medicine woman, is buried. The deed signing on February 26, 2026 returns to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians a site that has been under private or municipal ownership since the 1800s. The tribe also purchased an adjacent building that may become a cultural education center.

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Emperor of the Cherokee publishes on the day of that signing, on the ceremony's 296th anniversary.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen E. Dinehart IV is a professor, award-winning game designer, and storyteller whose historical narrative work spans two decades. His Company of Heroes campaigns, The British, The Wehrmacht, and The Tiger Ace, earned a best writing nomination at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2007. Emperor of the Cherokee is a return to that work, and a deeper one: a family story driven by family records and family memory, told for his ancestors and his children. Dinehart is a descendant of the Cherokee Overhill towns the novel follows. This is his account of that inheritance.

Website: https://EmperorOfTheCherokee.com
Preorder now on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GQNJFXXQ