Editing Nancy Ward (section)

===Captive rescue===
In her role as a Beloved Woman, Nancy Ward had the authority to spare captives. Following the Cherokee attacks on the Watauga settlements, she saved settler Lydia (Russell) Bean, the wife of [[William Bean]], at what is present day's [[Elizabethton, Tennessee]]. She took Bean into her house and nursed her back to health from her wounds. A recovered Bean taught Nanyehi a new loom-weaving technique, which she then taught other women in the tribe. The Cherokee 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 tribal members'  garments.<ref name=King>{{cite book | editor-last1=King| editor-first1=Duane H.| title=The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake : The Story of a Soldier, Adventurer, and Emissary to the Cherokees, 1756-1765| date=2007| publisher=Museum of the Cherokee Indian Press| location=Cherokee, N.C.| isbn=9780807831267| page=122| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vHr-cf5j0AEC&pg=PA122| access-date=28 March 2015}}</ref>

Lydia Bean had reclaimed two of her dairy [[cow]]s 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.<ref name=King/> Starr wrote that Nancy Ward successfully raised cows and was said to have been the first to introduce that industry among the Cherokees.<ref name = "starr"/> Those Cherokee who adopted loom weaving and dairy farming began to resemble European-American subsistence farmers. According to a 1933 account, Nanyehi was also among the first [[Slavery among Native Americans in the United States#Native American adaptation of African slaves|Cherokees to own African-American slaves]].<ref name= "Davis">{{cite journal | last1=Davis| first1=J. B.| title=Slavery in the Cherokee Nation| journal=Chronicles of Oklahoma| date=1933| volume=11| issue=4| url=http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v011/v011p1056.html| access-date=28 March 2015| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150310044812/http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v011/v011p1056.html| archive-date=10 March 2015| url-status=dead}}</ref>{{efn|Many Cherokee who adopted the practice of [[chattel slavery]] tended to be Cherokees in the Deep South, where they were developing cotton plantations.<ref name= "Davis" />}}