Nanyehi. Changes to Cherokee society In the early 1760s, the Cherokee entered an alliance with the British colonists who were fighting the French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years' War in Europe between Britain and France. Each side had Native American allies in North America. In exchange for their assistance, the British Americans promised to protect the Cherokee from the enemy Creek and Choctaw people. The British built military stations and frontier posts in Cherokee land. These posts gradually attracted more European-American settlers. A group of European-American frontiersmen killed a group of Cherokee in present-day West Virginia, who were returning from having helped the British take over Fort Duquesne (at present-day Pittsburgh). Outraged, the Cherokee killed more than 20 settlers in retaliation. Conflict broke out that lasted two years, during which the Cherokee captured Fort Loudon on the Tellico River in August 1760. In her role as a Ghigau, Nancy Ward (as she became known to English-speakers) had the authority to spare captives. In 1776, following a Cherokee attack on the Fort Watauga settlement on the Watauga River (at present day Elizabethton, Tennessee), she saved settler Lydia (Russell) Bean, the wife of a man named William. She took Bean into her house and nursed her back to health from her wounds. Bean taught Nanyehi a new loom-weaving technique, which she taught others. The women had typically made garments by sewing a combination of processed hides, handwoven vegetal fiber cloth, and cotton or wool cloth bought from traders. Women wove all the cloth in the village for their garments. Lydia Bean had brought two of her dairy cows from the settlement. While she was living with Nanyehi, she taught the Cherokee woman how to care for the cows, milk them, and process the milk into dairy products. Both the animals and their products would sustain the Cherokee when hunting was bad. Starr wrote that Nancy Ward successfully raised cows and was said to have been the first to introduce that industry among the Cherokees. Those Cherokee who adopted loom weaving and dairy farming began to resemble European-American subsistence farmers. Some Cherokee adopted the practice of chattel slavery, but these tended to be Cherokee in the Deep South, where they were developing cotton plantations. According to a 1933 account, Nanyehi was among the first Cherokee to own African-American slaves. After a truce, the Carolina Rangers and Royal