George Corn Tassel (Utsi'dsata) Probably was the son of Cherokee Chief Old Tassel (1738 to 1788). Was a Cherokee (Tsalagi) man illegally tried, convicted, and executed by the State of Georgia on December 24, 1830. This led to the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Worcester v. Georgia, which stated that the states do not have jurisdiction in Native American territories. In 1830 George Corn Tassel was charged with the murder of another Cherokee man named Sanders at Talking Rock Ford while under the influence of alcohol. Talking Rock (now Pickens County, Georgia) was within the Cherokee nation and 50 miles from Hall County. Since the Cherokee Nation was considered sovereign by U.S. law, Corn Tassel should have been tried in a Cherokee court. Corn Tassel was tried on November 22, 1830 in Gainesville, Georgia in Hall County's little 30x50 log Courthouse set in the center of town. A jury of 12 white men found Corn Tassel guilty of murder. Superior Court Judge Augustin Smith Clayton sentenced Corn Tassel to be hanged by the neck until dead. After he was sentenced to be hanged, his Defense counsel asked him how he liked the sentence. He answered that he would “rather go to his own country and be shot.” He was told that could not be done. “Well, then,” he said, “rather than be hung, I will go to Arkansas.” Corn Tassel's case was appealed and went before a “convention of judges" of Georgia superior courts, at that time the Georgia Supreme Court. The judges who denied Corn Tassel's appeal included Augustin S. Clayton (who had himself adjudicated Corn Tassel's case), William Law, William H. Crawford, William H. Holt, L.Q.C. Lamar, Charles Daugherty, C.B. Strong, G.E. Thomas, L. Warren, John W. Hooper, and H. Warner. At the request of Cherokee Chief John Ross, U.S. Attorney-General William Wirt brought up Corn Tassel’s appeal before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court accepted the appeal and issued a mandate forbidding Corn Tassel’s execution. The Court also ordered the state to produce the records of the trial. They would also order Georgia Governor George Gilmer to appear before them in January 1831. Gilmer responded by calling together an emergency session of the state's General Assembly on Dec. 22, 1830. In that session, laws were enacted nullifying any contracts between Georgia and the Cherokee people. Governor George Gilmer refused the Supreme Court's demand for trial records and proceeded with Corn Tassel's hanging on Dec. 24, 1830. On Christmas Eve morning, Sheriff Jacob Eberhart took Corn Tassel from the Hall County Jail in an oxcart to gallows erected for the hanging two blocks south of the log courthouse in a field on the end of Collage Ave. between Main and Grove streets. In a story published in the Gainesville Eagle on May 11, 1888, an eye-witness to the event recorded …What a day; cloudy, dark, rain, hail and sleet through the entire day. Every road leading to the town was thronged at an early hour with men, women and children from all parts of the county and many from adjoining counties until a vast multitude had assembled to witness the death of a human being while suspended between heaven and earth. Other accounts state that Corn Tassel spoke with “great calmness” to those assembled for the event. Some three hundred of Corn Tassel's friends were on hand to bid him farewell…. The prisoner (who had ridden to the site sitting on his own coffin in the back of a ox cart ) was ordered by the Sheriff to rise and stand upon his coffin, on which for some time he had been sitting. The arms were tied down, the cap drawn down over the face, the ox cart was driven forward leaving the body suspended in the air. A few shrugs of the shoulders, a little drawing up of the feet, and all was still and within twenty minutes the doctors in attendance pronounced him dead. When he was cut down from the scaffold, his body was given to fellow Cherokees who buried him "several hundred yards away," the witness wrote. On this occasion a conflict was anticipated by the whites, and a strong guard was provided, but the Cherokee peaceably dispersed after Corn Tassel was buried. So distraught were some that they were said to have gotten drunk that night. One froze to death on Soapstone Hill, which is the present site of Alta Vista Cemetery. Corn Tassel's gravesite remains a mystery, but he is probably near South Bradford Street. This was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega Georgia in 1828, or the Dahlonega Gold Rush. Then came the Cherokee removal in 1838 that caused the death of Approximately 2,000 to 6,000 of the 16,543 Cherokee and is called ( The Trail of Tears ). In 1966, Gainesville, Georgia, held its first annual crafts festival named the Corn Tassel Festival. The name continued to be in use until 1993 when, after the shameful discovery of what the State of Georgia did to Corn Tassel, the name was changed, by the Gainesville Jaycees, to Mule Camp Festival after the Cherokee trader outpost of the same name which became Gainesville Georgia.
Photo of Topp Scout is at Mule Camp Spring.