Dahlonega, Georgia, and the Cherokee Word for Yellow

In 1854, George White wrote that gold was “often found in the court-house square” of Dahlonega, Georgia, “particularly after a shower.” The town’s name fits: it comes from a Cherokee word for yellow, the color of the gold that drew miners into these hills. White’s Historical Collections of Georgia adds that “the little boys frequently pick up pieces of gold” there.

Yellow, or yellow money?

You’ll find two translations in the old books, and they’re closer than they look. White wrote that “the Indian name for Dahlonega was Tau-lau-ne-ca, meaning yellow money.” The 1906 Cyclopedia of Georgia repeats it with a hedge: the name “is said to be derived from Tau-la-ne-ca, an Indian word meaning yellow money.” Henry Gannett’s place-name bulletin for the U.S. Geological Survey (1905) gives it as a Cherokee word “signifying ‘yellow,’ referring to the gold formerly mined in upper Georgia.”

James Mooney explains how both can be true. In the glossary of his Myths of the Cherokee, published by the federal Bureau of American Ethnology, he traces Dahlonega to the Cherokee word for yellow and notes that a longer phrase built on it, meaning “yellow money,” was the Cherokee way of saying gold. So “yellow” is the root, and “yellow money” is gold.

Lucian Lamar Knight added a caution in 1913. Nobody could say when the word was first coined, he wrote, or whether the Cherokee were the ones who first applied it to the place, or whether it was simply an expression “which caught the fancy of the whites.”

The gold behind the name

Mooney tells how the gold turned up. Around 1815, he says, a Cherokee boy playing along the Chestatee River brought his mother a shining yellow pebble that proved to be a nugget. About 1828, gold was found on Ward’s Creek, near where Dahlonega stands, “and the doom of the nation was sealed.” Knight puts it bluntly: “The discovery of gold in North Georgia operated as a spur to hasten the departure of the Cherokees toward the West.”

Once the Cherokee were removed, Knight writes, the federal government opened a branch mint at Dahlonega in 1838. It ran until 1861 and coined 1,381,748 gold pieces worth $6,115,569.

“There’s millions in it”

Knight passes along one more story, and he’s careful to credit it. A former state geologist, Professor W. S. Yates, said that in 1849, when miners around Dahlonega were thinking of leaving for California, an amateur geologist named Dr. M. F. Stevenson climbed the courthouse steps and pointed at Findley Ridge, about half a mile south. “Why go to California? In that ridge lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There’s millions in it.”

According to Yates, the miners carried the line west with them, and Mark Twain picked it up in a California camp and gave it to his character Colonel Mulberry Sellers. That’s Yates’s account, as Knight quotes it from an 1896 state report on Georgia’s gold deposits, and nothing else here backs up the Mark Twain part. But you can see the ridge Stevenson was pointing at on the 1886 map at the top of this page, with the Findley Mine right beside it.

Sources & further reading

• George White, Historical Collections of Georgia (1854), p. 542. Gold in the courthouse square after a shower, the boys picking it up, and “Tau-lau-ne-ca, meaning yellow money.”
• James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Bureau of American Ethnology). The nugget on the Chestatee and the gold on Ward’s Creek (p. 116); the glossary entry for Dahlonega, “yellow” and “yellow money” (p. 514).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The Cherokee word “signifying ‘yellow.’”
• Allen D. Candler and Clement A. Evans, eds., Cyclopedia of Georgia, vol. 1 (1906). “Said to be derived from Tau-la-ne-ca.”
• Lucian Lamar Knight, Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials and Legends, vol. 1 (1913), pp. 185-189. The doubts about when the word was first used, the branch mint, and Yates’s story about “There’s millions in it.”
• GNIS feature 355420 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: county seat of Lumpkin County in 1833.