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William Holland Thomas was born to Temperance Calvert Thomas on February 5, 1805, in rural Haywood County. He entered the world an orphan, as his father had drowned in the fall of 1804. An extremely intelligent boy, William worked in a trading store in the Cherokee territory of western North Carolina. There he learned the Cherokee language and was adopted into the clan of the chief Yonaguska. Thomas acquired property and became a respected businessman. A self-taught attorney, he represented the North Carolina Cherokee on many occasions and helped them secure the right to remain on their land during the Cherokee removal in 1838. In April 1839, the dying Yonaguska made William Holland Thomas the new Cherokee chief. Ambitious and successful, Thomas entered politics and served in the state senate from 1849 to 1861. A strong supporter of states' rights, he voted for secession at the May 1861 state convention and publicly denounced President Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant.
From the beginning of the war, William Holland Thomas openly promoted the idea of North Carolina Cherokee fighting for the Confederacy. In 1862 he entered the army and organized a military unit known as Thomas's Legion, which included Cherokee fiercely loyal to him. These soldiers spent much of the war in western North Carolina preventing Union forces in eastern Tennessee from entering the Tar Heel State. Thomas's men remained loyal to him throughout the war and fought until the end. Even so, Thomas was past his middle fifties when he entered the army, and the strain of active military service took a toll on his physical and mental health. Adding to the stress were his responsibilities as leader of the North Carolina Cherokee.
Thomas's Legion surrendered at Waynesville on May 9, 1865, several weeks after the capitulation of Confederate forces at Appomattox and near Durham. Its men were the last Confederates to surrender in North Carolina. William Holland Thomas went home to his wife, their three children, and those Cherokees who still looked to him as chief. He received a pardon from President Andrew Johnson in 1866 and hoped to reenter politics and business. Thomas's mental condition continued to deteriorate, however, and he soon found himself hopelessly in debt. Compounding his worries was the responsibility to care for his beloved Cherokee, who faced a devastating smallpox epidemic after the war. In March 1867, Thomas was declared insane and placed in a state institution in Raleigh. From then until the end of his life, Thomas lived in and out of mental hospitals. In 1887 Thomas assisted Smithsonian Institution ethnologist James Mooney when he went to western North Carolina to gather information on the Cherokee. William Holland Thomas died in the state mental hospital in Morganton, Burke County, on May 10, 1893. He is remembered today in the outdoor drama Unto These Hills, and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian displays the battle flag of Thomas's Legion as part of the Cherokee heritage.
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