A Band of Cherokees Holds On
The Cherokees who remained in the East endured many changes in the early 1800s.
As their Nation dwindled in size to cover only portions of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the influence of growing white settlements began to encroach on the old ways, the accepted beliefs. Settlers intermarried with Indians. Aspects of the Nation’s civilization gradually grew to resemble that of the surrounding states.
The Cherokees diversified and improved their agricultural economy. They came to rely more heavily on livestock. Herds of sheep, goats, and hogs, as well as cattle, grazed throughout the Nation. Along with crops of aromatic tobacco, and such staples as squash, potatoes, beans, and the ever-present corn, the Cherokees were cultivating cotton, grains, indigo, and other trade items. Boats carried tons of export to New Orleans and other river cities. Home industry, such as spinning and weaving, multiplied; local merchants thrived.
Church missions and their attendant schools were established. As early as 1801, members of the Society of United Brethren set up a station of missionaries at a north Georgia site called Spring Place. And within five years, the Rev. Gideon Blackburn from East Tennessee persuaded his Presbyterians to subsidize two schools.
In 1817, perhaps the most famous of all the Cherokee missions was opened on Chickamauga Creek at Brainerd, just across the Tennessee line from Georgia. Founded by Cyrus Kingsbury and a combined Congregational-Presbyterian board, Brainerd Mission educated many Cherokee leaders, including Elias Boudinot and John Ridge. Samuel Austin Worcester, a prominent Congregational minister from New England, taught at Brainerd from 1825 until 1834. He became a great friend of the Cherokees and was referred to as “The Messenger.”
In 1821, a single individual gave to his Nation an educational innovation as significant and far-reaching as the influx of schools. A Cherokee named Sequoyah, known among whites as George Gist, had long been interested in the “talking leaves” of the white man. After years of thought, study, and hard work, he devised an 86-character Cherokee alphabet. Born about 1760 near old Fort Loudoun, Tennessee, Sequoyah had neither attended school nor learned English. By 1818, he had moved to Willstown in what is now eastern Alabama and had grown interested in the white man’s ability to write. He determined that he would give his own people the same advantage.
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Sequoyah displays the Cherokee alphabet he developed.
The first painstaking process he tried called for attaching a mark to each Cherokee word. These marks soon mounted into the thousands. As he sensed the futility of this one-for-one relationship, he examined English letters in an old newspaper. His own mind linked symbols of this sort with basic sounds of the Cherokee tongue. After months of work, he sorted out these sounds and assigned them symbols based, to a large extent, upon the ones he had seen in the newspaper. When he introduced his invention to his fellow Cherokees, it was as if he had loosed a floodgate. Within the space of a few weeks, elders and children alike began to read and write. The change was incredible.
Sequoyah himself vaulted into a position of great respect inside the Nation. One of his many awestruck visitors, John Howard Payne, described him with the finest detail and noted that Sequoyah wore
“... a turban of roses and posies upon a white ground girding his venerable grey hairs, a long dark blue robe, bordered around the lower edge and the cuffs, with black; a blue and white minutely checked calico tunic under it, confined with an Indian beaded belt, which sustained a large wooden handled knife, in a rough leathern sheath; the tunic open on the breast and its collar apart, with a twisted handkerchief flung around his neck and gathered within the bosom of the tunic. He wore plain buckskin leggings; and one of a deeper chocolate hue than the other. His moccasins were unornamented buckskin. He had a long dusky white bag of sumac with him, and a long Indian pipe, and smoked incessantly, replenishing his pipe from his bag. His air was altogether what we picture to ourselves of an old Greek philosopher. He talked and gesticulated very gracefully; his voice alternately swelling, and then sinking to a whisper, and his eye firing up and then its wild flashes subsiding into a gentle and most benignant smile.”
During the 1820s, Sequoyah moved west to Arkansas. Preoccupied with the legend of a lost band of Cherokees somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, he initiated several attempts to discover the group. But age caught up with him. He died alone in northern Mexico in the summer of 1843. He had brought his Nation a long way. His name would be immortalized in the great redwood tree of the Far West, the giant sequoia. And in a sense his spirit lived on in the first Cherokee newspaper—the Cherokee Phoenix—which was established in 1828 at New Echota, with Elias Boudinot as its editor and Samuel Worcester as its business manager.
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Students stand before the original school building at Dwight Mission, the first Cherokee mission west of the Mississippi River. The one-room log schoolhouse is very much like those the white settlers built and used for years in the Smokies.
The Cherokees also made remarkable changes in government. In 1808, they adopted a written legal code; a dozen years later, they divided the Nation into judicial districts and designated judges. The first Supreme Court of the Cherokees was established in 1822, and by 1827 the Nation had drawn up an American-based Constitution. The president of the constitutional convention was a 37-year-old leader named John Ross. A year later, he began a 40-year term as principal chief of his people.
But whatever the progress of the internal affairs of the Cherokee Nation, political relations with the United States steadily disintegrated. Although the first quarter of the 19th century saw a sympathetic man, Return Jonathan Meigs, serve as America’s southern Indian agent, even he and his position could not prevent the relentless pursuit of Indian territory.
In 1802 and 1803, the U.S. Government set a dangerous precedent for the Cherokees. In return for Georgia’s abandonment of her claims to the Mississippi Territory, the United States agreed to extinguish all Indian titles for lands lying within Georgia. This indicated that the government was no longer prepared to defend the Cherokee Nation.
President Thomas Jefferson acted to alleviate some of the Cherokee loss. He suggested a program of removal west to a portion of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. Most Cherokees hated the plan, yet some harassed bands made the trip to what is now Arkansas. The foot was in the door; hereafter, the government could point to a few Cherokees in Arkansas and direct others there. Even though 800 eastern Cherokee warriors fought alongside Americans during the War of 1812, the United States came to recognize only the government of the Cherokees West.
But what of the Cherokees East? They waited. They pursued daily routines while the pressures around them gathered and grew. And by 1828, these pressures had reached a degree which showed the Cherokees that the final crush was on.
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Elias Boudinot ([top]), editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, bowed to pressure and joined those willing to move west.
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John Ross remained firm in his opposition to the removal of the Cherokees. He was in the last group to leave.
It began inside the Nation. In the winter of 1828, an old Cherokee councilman, Whitepath, rose up in rebellion against the new constitution. Suspicious of the Nation’s whirlwind progress, fearful of the Nation’s stormy enemies, Whitepath attempted to persuade his 15,000 countrymen to hold fast to the ways of the past. He assembled a series of localized meetings, where he advocated the abandonment of white religion, society, economy. He called for a return to tribal organization, but his call fell on younger ears and his plan was doomed to failure.
The Cherokees turned to John Ross for leadership. Like Sequoyah, John Ross possessed both grace and ability. These assets, combined with courage, enabled him to accomplish seemingly remote goals for his people. This handsome statesman, educated by his own father, represented the middle ground of Cherokee policy. Though refusing the reactionism of a Whitepath, John Ross also rejected any proposal to move west. For he knew that his people had lived here in the Smokies and belonged here, and he would not have them forced from their homeland.
Andrew Jackson would. This stern Tennessee soldier and politician began his career as a headlong Indian fighter and never lost the zeal. Although Jackson the soldier had been aided numerous times by Cherokee warriors, Jackson the politician was determined to move the Cherokees west. And in the watershed years of 1828 and 1829, Andrew Jackson was elected and sworn in as President of the United States.
Events conspired against the Nation. In July of 1829, in what is now known as Lumpkin County, Georgia, a few shiny nuggets of gold were discovered on Ward’s Creek of the Chestatee River. Within days, fortune hunters swarmed into the territory; more than 10,000 gold-seekers squatted on Cherokee lands, disregarded Cherokee rights, and pillaged Cherokee homes. With Jackson’s support, the Georgia legislature passed laws confiscating Indian land, nullifying Indian law, and prohibiting Indian assembly. By the end of 1829, the script for Cherokee removal had been blazoned in gold.
But there was more. Andrew Jackson asked Congress for “a general removal law” that would give him prime authority in the matter at the same time that it formed the basis for future treaty negotiation. Congress passed the Removal Act, which included a half-million dollar appropriation for that purpose, in May of 1830. Davy Crockett, whose legendary exploits and down-to-earth compassion made him perhaps the best representative of the mountain spirit, was a U.S. congressman at the time. Although his grandfather had been murdered by Dragging Canoe, Davy Crockett argued against and voted against the bill. He was the only Tennessean to do so, and he was defeated when he ran for reelection.
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Major Ridge signed a treaty ceding all of the Cherokees’ land in the east to the United States. He, his son John, and his nephew Elias Boudinot were “executed” on June 22, 1839.
Cherokee leaders sought help from the U.S. courts. Their friend and missionary, sober and troubled Samuel Worcester, fell victim to a Georgia law “prohibiting the unauthorized residence of white men within the Cherokee Nation.” Worcester appealed to the Supreme Court, which in February of 1832 considered the case of Worcester v. Georgia. On March 3, a feeble Chief Justice John Marshall read the Court’s decision to a packed room: all the Georgia laws against the Cherokee Nation were declared unconstitutional.
Elias Boudinot, editor of the Phoenix and a special friend of Worcester, wrote to his brother and expressed the Nation’s joy and relief:
“It is glorious news. The laws of the state are declared by the highest judicial tribunal in the country to be null and void. It is a great triumph on the part of the Cherokees.... The question is forever settled as to who is right and who is wrong.”
Yet Andrew Jackson would not stand for such a settlement. “John Marshall has made his decision,” Jackson thundered, “now let him enforce it.” This was the single instance in American history where the President so bluntly and openly defied a Supreme Court ruling. The situation grew more bleak. Worcester was released from jail only after appealing to the “good will” of the state of Georgia. Matters worsened as Georgia conducted its Cherokee Lottery of 1832, and thousands of white men descended onto lots carved out of the Cherokee land.
Boudinot and several other Cherokee leaders, including John Ridge, grew discouraged to the point of resignation. Jackson’s attitude as President, coupled with Georgia’s unrelenting attack and the Supreme Court’s inability to stop it, caused a change of heart in Boudinot and Ridge. Boudinot stepped down from the Phoenix and, with Major Ridge, became an important spokesman for a minority faction of Cherokees which was prepared to move west. However, John Ross continued to speak for the vast majority who rejected any discussion of removal.
By 1835, the rift between the Ridge party and John Ross’ followers had become open and intense. Seeking to take advantage of this division, Jackson appointed a New York minister, J.F. Schermerhorn, to deal with Boudinot and Ridge. The Cherokee supporters of Ross hated this “loose Dutch Presbyterian minister” and referred to him as “The Devil’s Horn.”
On several occasions, Ross attempted to negotiate a reasonable solution with Washington. He was frustrated at every turn. In November of 1835, he and the visiting John Howard Payne were arrested by the Georgia militia. In jail, Payne heard a Georgia guard singing “Home Sweet Home” outside his cell. Payne asked the man if he knew that his prisoner had written the song; the guard seemed unimpressed. After spending nine days in jail, Ross and Payne were released without any explanation for their treatment.
Ross traveled on to Washington to resume negotiations. While he was there, Schermerhorn and the Ridge party drew up and signed a treaty. Endorsed by a scant one-tenth of the Nation’s 16,000 Cherokees, this treaty ceded to the United States all eastern territory in exchange for $5 million and a comparable amount of western land. Cherokees throughout the Nation registered shock and betrayal; Boudinot and Ridge, their lives already threatened numerous times, would be murdered within four years. Yet despite Ross’ protestations of fraud, the U.S. Senate ratified the minority Treaty of New Echota by one vote. A new President, Martin Van Buren, authorized Gen. Winfield Scott to begin the removal of all Cherokees in the summer of 1838.
Scott, while determined to carry out the removal, tried in vain to restrain his troops from inflicting undue hardships. Scott’s soldiers moved relentlessly through the Nation. As one private remembered it in later years:
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Ginatiyun tihi, or Stephen Tehee, was born in Georgia six months before the removal of the Cherokees to the West. He served as a tribal delegate to Washington in 1898.
“Men working in the fields were arrested and driven to the stockades. Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they could not understand. Children were often separated from their parents and driven into the stockades with the sky for a blanket and earth for a pillow.”
The soldiers built 13 stockades in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. Using these as base camps, they scattered throughout the countryside with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets. As they herded Indians back toward the forts, bands of roving outlaws burned the homes, stole the livestock, robbed the graves. Throughout the summer, a stifling drought settled over the hot, depleted Nation. By August, many of the captured Cherokees had succumbed to sickness or even death.
Removal itself began during the autumn. A few early contingents had been moved out along the Tennessee River in large two-decker keelboats. The majority would travel overland. Thirteen detachments of about 1,000 each, plus 645 wagons carrying the sick and aged, departed from southeastern Tennessee. Early on in their journey, the weather changed. Winter stalked the doomed procession with the tenacity of a bloodhound. By the time the Cherokees crossed the Mississippi River many had died because of lack of food and warmth. In March of 1839, the dwindling band reached what is now Oklahoma. Four thousand Cherokees, almost one-third of all who left their mountain homeland, had been taken by the cold, hard hand of death.
The tragedy would be recorded in history as the “Trail of Tears.” Along the route, old Whitepath died. The wife of John Ross gave her blanket to a sick child and herself suffered fatal exposure. A white Georgia volunteer summarized the needless pain in one short sentence: “That Cherokee removal was the crudest work I ever knew.” But disaster was not the final conqueror. For out of that cruelty came sacrifice; out of that death came rebirth.
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Tsiskwa-kaluya, or Bird Chopper, was son of Yonahguskah, the famous Cherokee chief and spokesman who stayed with the small group in the Great Smoky Mountains.
The improbable source of that rebirth was a farmer named Tsali. Old Man Charley. Until October of 1838, he was simply another Indian to be herded to the stockade. A lieutenant and three other soldiers were assigned to capture all Cherokees along the headwaters of the Oconaluftee. As the patrol traveled up the Little Tennessee River, it rounded up Tsali, his family, and a few friends. The soldiers prodded the Indians with bayonets and forced Tsali’s wife to hasten her steps. Driven to anger and desperation, Tsali called the other warriors to action. In the quick, sudden tangle that followed, at least one soldier was killed. Tsali and his small band fled across the river high into the Great Smoky Mountains. They hid in a massive rock shelter at the head of Deep Creek. Located on top of a steep cliff, the actual camping place lay in the midst of extensive, thick laurel and hemlock “roughs.” Several hundred other Cherokees escaped from the soldiers or the stockades and found similar hiding places on the rugged, overgrown sides of the Smokies. Most of them lasted out the winter, subsisting at a near-starvation level on roots, herbs, nuts, and small game.
Confronted with such determination and the likelihood of a prolonged, wearisome mission of search and arrest in the rugged mountains, General Scott offered a compromise. If Tsali and his small party would come down and give themselves up for punishment, the rest of the Cherokee fugitives would be allowed to stay in the mountains until a solution could be reached by all sides. Scott sent W. H. Thomas, a white man who had grown up with the Cherokees, into the Smokies to present the terms. Thomas found Tsali, who silently listened and decided on his own accord to accompany Thomas out of the mountains. Early in the year of 1839, Tsali and his brother and his eldest son were shot by a firing squad. The youngest son, Wasituna (for Washington) was left to take word of the deaths back to the Cherokees who remained in their hills.
They had held onto their homeland in the Great Smoky Mountains. By nothing more than the thin grip of desperate determination, they had held on, and they would remain. Reinforced by General Scott’s promise, scattered friends in the East, and Thomas’ political negotiations with Washington and North Carolina, the Cherokee remnant soon became the Eastern Band. Their homeland would now be known as the Qualla Reservation. So the Cherokees East, along with the white pioneers of the Great Smokies, turned together to brace the mountainous challenge of the 19th century.
Aaron Swaniger was an individualist who occasionally stayed in Cades Cove. To some “mountaineers” he was a “hillbilly.”
Edouard E. Exline