Cherokee Indians
The Cherokee nation was settled in the shadow of the Smokies. “The place of the blue smoke,” they called the mountains in their heartland, and so the Smokies have become named. Myth, ritual, and religion bound the Cherokees closely to the land. Ironically, they enjoyed a sophisticated culture very similar to the white culture that would so cruelly supplant them. They were agrarian and democratic, and they believed in one god. They lived in mud-and-log cabins, women sharing tribal governance, and men sharing household duties.
The Cherokees rapidly adopted governmental features of the invading culture. They adopted a written legal code in 1808. Within a dozen years they had divided their nation into judicial districts with designated judges. Two years later they had established the Supreme Court of the feat. Within just two years of its adoption, The Cherokee Phoenix newspaper was published and most Cherokee-speakers could read and write! But the white people had an insatiable appetite for land. Treaty after treaty was made and broken. The fatal blow was the discovery of gold in 1828 near the Cherokee villages in northern Georgia. Within a few years all their land was confiscated. The infamous “Trail of Tears” came with passage of the 1830 Removal Act.
Some 13,000 Cherokees were forced to march to Oklahoma: 25 percent died en route. Not all left, however, and some soon returned. Today the eastern band of Cherokees lives on the Cherokee Reservation on the park’s North Carolina side.