Bryson City is a town in and the county seat of Swain County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 1,558 as of the 2020 census. Located in what was historically the land of the Cherokee, Bryson City was founded as the Charleston to help as the county chair of Swain County like it was formed from parts of surrounding counties. It grew into an important local rail hub. Today the city serves as a popular tourist destination, lying just to the west of the approach to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, for outdoor comings and goings in the Nantahala National Forest, and along the Nantahala River and Fontana Lake, and serves as the house of the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad, a stock railroad that provides tours of the Nantahala valley. The popular Nantahala Outdoor Center provides guide facilities for many of the outdoor happenings in the area.

Indigenous cultures of Native Americans have been bustling and hunting along the Tuckasegee River in the vicinity of what is now Bryson City for approximately 14,000 years. The village of Kituwa, which the Cherokee believed to be their oldest village and “mother town”, was located along the Tuckasegee River. The ancient mound and village site is now controlled anew by the federally attributed Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and is preserved as a sacred site. (Bryson City developed downstream from this site.)

In 1567, an orata (minor chief) from Kituwa is believed to have met taking into consideration Spanish investor Juan Pardo in the French Broad Valley to the north. During the American Revolutionary War, many Cherokee allied with the British, hoping to expel European Americans from their territory. American soldiers burned and destroyed the town of Kituwa in 1776, but the Cherokee continued to maintain annual ceremonial dances at the site throughout the 19th century.

Around 1818, a Cherokee chief known as enormous Bear time-honored a 640-acre (2.6 km) reservation of land hurriedly west of the confluence of Deep Creek and the Tuckasegee River. Big Bear sold share of his reservation to Darling Belk in 1819 and another part to John B. Love in 1824. Throughout the 1830s, Belk’s heirs and Love fought an extended legal fight over manage of the former huge Bear land, with Love finally prevailing in 1840. The behind year, Love sold part of the home to James and Diana Shuler. The Shulers, in turn, sold parts of their land to Colonel Thaddeus Bryson and merchant Alfred Cline. A small hamlet known as Bear Springs developed on what was once Big Bear’s reservation.