Nancy Ward was born among the Cherokee Indians and lived at the Overhill town of Great Echota in what is now Monroe County, Tenn. Her father is believed to have been a British officer and her mother a sister of the Cherokee chief Attakullaculla.
Distinguished among the Cherokee by the title of "Beloved Woman" or "Pretty Woman, " she enjoyed the right to sit in council and, especially, the right to revoke by her single will any tribal sentence of punishment or death. It is said that she was one of the first to introduce Negro slavery and the use of cattle among the Cherokee. An advocate of peace within the tribe and beyond the tribe, she helped the white frontiersmen again and again. At the outbreak of the Revolution it was she who warned the Watauga and Holston settlers in time to save themselves from destruction at the hands of the Indians. She also exercised her right to spare the prisoners captured in the raids and to pardon them even though already condemned and bound to the stake. Later in the war she again reported early news of Indian attack and supplied the Americans with beef cattle from her own large herd. When the Indians were repulsed she sought to intercede for her people, but, although she seems to have been kindly treated, her mission was unsuccessful. Her part in the unsettled years after the Revolution is obscure, and, although her name was mentioned by Nuttall as late as 1819, it is not clear that she was still living at that time.
She believed in peaceful coexistence with the European-Americans and helped her people as peace negotiator and ambassador. She also introduced them to farming and dairy production bringing substantial changes to the Cherokee society.
