Raided and sacked alternately, not only by the Confederate and Union forces, but by the vindictive ferocity and hate of their own factional divisions, their country became a blackened and desolate waste. Driven from comfortable homes, exposed to want, misery, and the elements, they perished like sheep in a snow storm. Their houses, fences, and other improvements were burned, their orchards destroyed, their flocks and herds slaughtered or driven off, their schools broken up, and their school-houses given to the flames, their churches and public buildings subjected to a similar fate, and that entire portion of their country which had been occupied by their settlements was distinguishable from the virgin prairie only by the scorched and blackened chimneys and the plowed but now neglected fields.
The war over and the work of reconstruction commenced, found them numbering fourteen thousand impoverished, heart broken, and revengeful people. But they must work or starve, and in almost sullen despair they set about rebuilding their waste places. The situation was one calculated to discourage men enjoying a higher degree of civilization than they had yet reached, but they bent to the task with a determination and perseverance that could not fail to be the parent of success.
To-day their country is more prosperous than ever. They number twenty-two thousand, a greater population than they have had at any previous period, except perhaps just prior to the date of the treaty of 1835, when those east added to those west of the Mississippi are stated to have aggregated nearly twenty-five thousand people.[693] To-day they have twenty-three hundred scholars attending seventy-five schools, established and supported by themselves at an annual expense to the nation of nearly $100,000. To-day thirteen thousand of their people can read and eighteen thousand can speak the English language. To-day five thousand brick, frame, and log houses are occupied by them; and they have sixty-four churches with a membership of several thousand. They cultivate a hundred thousand acres of land and have an additional one hundred and fifty thousand fenced. They raise annually 100,000 bushels of wheat, 800,000 of corn, 100,000 of oats and barley, 27,500 of vegetables, 1,000,000 pounds of cotton, 500,000 pounds of butter, 12,000 tons of hay, and saw a million feet of lumber. They own 20,000 horses, 15,000 mules, 200,000 cattle, 100,000 swine, and 12,000 sheep.
They have a constitutional form of government predicated upon that of the United States. As a rule, their laws are wise and beneficent and are enforced with strictness and justice. Political and social prejudice has deprived the former slaves in some instances of the full measure of rights guaranteed to them by the treaty of 1866 and the amended constitution of the nation, but time is rapidly softening these asperities and will solve all difficulties of the situation.
The present Cherokee population is of a composite character. Remnants of other nations or tribes have from time to time been absorbed and admitted to full participation in the benefits of Cherokee citizenship. The various classes may be thus enumerated:
1. The full blood Cherokees.
2. The mixed blood Cherokees.
3. The Delawares.
4. The Shawnees.
5. White men and women intermarried with the foregoing.