According to legend, Nancy Ward, also known as Nanye’hi or Na-ni, was born in the 1730s at Chota in the Overhill Towns, when Cherokee society remained largely traditional despite the extensive fur trade. As the child of a Cherokee woman, she belonged by birth to her mother’s matrilineal clan, lived among her mother’s kin, and worked beside them in garden plots and corn fields allotted by their clan. Some accounts say her father was Cherokee, while others identify him as a British trader or a Delaware Indian, and Attakullakulla, peace chief of Chota, is said to have been her mother’s brother. Nancy became a prominent War Woman and Beloved Woman, or Ghi-ga-u, helping respected male elders carry out ceremonies and assisting war leaders with negotiations. Among British and Americans, she gained a myth-like reputation as an emissary, orator, and protector of white settlers and captives. She was known by the surname of the British trader Bryan(t) Ward, whom she married. After the repeated destruction of Chota in the 1770s and 1780s, Nancy Ward, her children, and other kin moved south of the Hiwasee River and finally settled at Amoiah, near present-day Benton. During her last decades, she operated an inn and stockpen at Womankiller Ford, not far from her gravesite. According to a great-grandson who attended her funeral, Nancy Ward died in 1822 and was buried by Cherokee custom. On May 2, 1817, a Woman’s Council led by the elderly Nancy Ward, or her representative, presented and signed an address to a Cherokee National Council meeting at nearby Amoiah, demanding an end to the ceding of Cherokee lands, which by tradition belonged to Cherokee women and their children.