At Georgia’s Fort Mountain State Park, a historical marker erected in the 1960s tells of a mysterious race of “moon-eyed” people that are said to have occupied Appalachia until they were vanquished by the Cherokee hundreds of years ago. Nearby sits an ancient stone wall, thought to be the remains of a battlement that some people believe was built by these weird little critters to defend themselves from their Native American foe.
According to the legend, the moon-eyed people were short, white-skinned and bearded, and only came out at night because their fragile eyes couldn’t handle daylight. Unsurprisingly, there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever to suggest these oddballs ever existed, yet that hasn’t curbed the hysteria among visitors to the Appalachian mountains.
Exactly where the myth comes from is unclear, and even though the Cherokee are named as a major protagonist in the story of these optically-challenged dwarfs, the moon-eyed mystery does not feature in their history or culture. In all likelihood, the legend was first introduced by the eighteenth-century American botanist Benjamin Smith Barton, who claimed that the Cherokee themselves had admitted to usurping the land of the hairy-faced beings.
Supposedly, the Indigenous group defeated the moon-eyed people after waging war during a full moon, when the dazzling lunar glare impeded the ancient creatures’ ability to defend themselves. Weirdly, the Cherokee County Historical Museum in North Carolina does contain a sculpture depicting two flat-faced humanoids with crescent-shaped eyes, although while some cite this as proof, there’s no evidence that the piece has anything to do with the moon-eyed people.
As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, a second historical marker at Fort Mountain provides the fuel for a second theory – namely that the moon-eyed people were in fact the descendants of a Welsh prince named Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, who is said to have reached North America in the twelfth century. Like all other hypotheses, this idea is pretty nonsensical as Welshmen are not miniature, nor are they incapable of being outside in daylight.
Some proponents of this theory therefore say that the term “moon-eyed” is actually a nickname invented by the Cherokee in reference to the Welsh settlers’ love of mining. Because they spent so much of the day underground, rumors apparently began to spread that the light-skinned invaders preferred to surface at night, as their eyes were so accustomed to the dark.
So, were the moon-eyed people ancient gnomes, Welsh settlers or none of the above? For now, all we have is speculation.
