Reservations: gambling has changed life for the Cherokee. Some say they've lost more than they've won.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Cover Story

In the gray mountains' shadow, dusk comes early. Long ago, they called this remote spot Ka'lanun'yi--Raven Place--and the querulous calls of the birds can still be heard over the Raven Fork River's tumbling waters. Otherwise, the damp forest is quiet, scented with wood smoke from chimneys of houses upstream. Now this is known as Big Cove and, except for Tuti'yi--Snowbird--40 miles to the west in Graham County, this is where the people have the darkest eyes and purest blood.

At nightfall, at the end of the drive down winding Big Cove Road to town, the blaze of neon is jarring. Motel signs twinkle. A marquee flashes: "Neil Sedaka--playing at 9." Next door to a 15-story hotel, at the native-stone entrance to a building almost as large as a shopping center, another sign blinks: "Jackpots paid today--$420,411." Inside, gamblers feed flashing video poker machines, sometimes with both hands, playing two at once. A blackjack dealer taps a button, and cards appear on screens before each player. "Hit me again," a man in a denim cowboy shirt grunts. A disco beat pulses above the voices and laughter. The night has barely begun.

Six years ago, Harrah's Cherokee Casino opened here on ground where Indians once bet on stickball and teased luck tossing game stones. Now the white man's games and economics are transforming existence for the 7,478 members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who live here. The rhythm of commerce--the frenzied summer tourism season followed by months of solitude--is changing. Poverty is down dramatically, and employment is up.

Last year, more than 3.5 million tourists poured into this $105 million casino with its 3,400 gaming machines. Few showed interest in places such as Snowbird or Indians such as Alfred and Maybelle Welch who live there and shun the rubber-toma-hawk shops of Cherokee's Main Street to sing Southern gospel hymns like I'll Fly Away in the soft, guttural Cherokee tongue. Instead, the visitors leave their mark--new restaurants, motels, highways and, last year, about $155 million in casino and hotel profits, split evenly between members of the tribe and its government.

The casino, hotel, tribal government and other Indian enterprises employ close to 3,000 year-round, not counting hundreds more who work for 200 private businesses, most owned by Cherokees. The Eastern Band has supplanted Western Carolina University, with its 1,050 jobs, as the state's largest employer west of Asheville. In late January, the tribe contributed $1.9 million to a project to bring faster Internet service to six surrounding counties. "The Eastern Band is the best hope for this region," Principal Chief Michell Hicks, 39, says. "We're the economic engine that's going to take it forward."

At twilight on another wintry day at an athletic field across from a new, $2 million emergency medical services center, a dozen barefoot Cherokee youth practice the game they call a-ne-jo-di--"little brother of war." Scooping up a deerskin ball in handmade webbed sticks, the stickball players dash past defenders and hurl it into a goal. Gambling profits paid each tribal member $6,674 last year, notes Joyce Dugan, 55, a former principal chief and now external-relations director for the casino. For youths such as the ballplayers, the money accumulates in investment trusts until they're 18, if they graduate from high school, or 21, if they don't. Some could be millionaires by the time they become adults.

But others worry. At 5 o'clock in the morning in the casino parking lots, frost covers the cars and tour buses of those still inside. Nights like these are fretful for traditionalists such as 57-year-old David Long, a craggy-faced full-blood who has spent his life here except for a hitch in the Army and service in Vietnam. "They're raping our land and straining our natural resources," he says. "Before the casino, life was good here. This was the Cherokee's allotted space. Now the vultures have come."

Long and others might be clinging to a romanticized way of life long vanished, but few dispute their contention that gambling, for all its largess, has divided the politically conservative, clannish and religious Cherokee. Some members of the reservation's 40 mostly Protestant churches refuse their share of what they call the lucre of sin. Bitter skirmishes have erupted over bloodlines, and tribal politics are growing more raucous with the rising financial stakes. Two of the last four chiefs have faced attempts to impeach them.

A stark billboard south of town, paid for with casino profits, refers to the tribe's tumultuous history: "This community can heal from wounded spirits with dignity and courage by facing the painful trauma of the past." The...