Cherokee

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cherokee people speak a language so distinct from their neighbors in the American Southeast that its very existence poses a puzzle stretching back thousands of years. Their tongue belongs to the Iroquoian family, a group whose speakers were historically clustered around the Great Lakes region, hundreds of miles to the north. Yet here were the Cherokee, settled deep in the southern Appalachian mountains, living in towns along the river valleys of what is now North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Their ancestral homelands together covered roughly 40,000 square miles.

  How did they get there? Were they ancient residents of the Southeast, or migrants from the north? When Sequoyah introduced his syllabary in 1821, creating the first written syllabic form of any American Indian language outside Central America, he gave his people a tool to preserve their own answers to that question. And when more than 16,000 Cherokee were forcibly marched westward in 1838 and 1839 in what became known as the Trail of Tears, with as many as 4,000 dying along the way, that question of origins became inseparable from the question of survival.

  Today the Cherokee Nation alone has more than 300,000 enrolled citizens, making it the largest of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States. Three separate federally recognized tribes carry the Cherokee name forward. What shaped them, what nearly destroyed them, and what they built and rebuilt across centuries is a story that touches the deepest fault lines of American history.

• 2. A Language Out of Place

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  Scholars have long been struck by a linguistic anomaly: the Cherokee and the Tuscarora of the Carolinas spoke Iroquoian languages, while virtually every other Native people of the American Southeast at the start of the historic era spoke languages from entirely different families. Iroquoian languages were the tongue of peoples around the Great Lakes, of the Haudenosaunee nations based in New York and Pennsylvania. The Cherokee were far to the south.

  Two theories have competed to explain this. The first holds that the Cherokee migrated southward from the Great Lakes region in ancient times. That view draws support from oral tradition: ethnographer James Mooney, who spent time with the Cherokee in the late 1880s, recorded elders recounting precisely this migration story. The Cherokee themselves say that the ancient settlement of Kituwa, on the Tuckasegee River, is their original home in the Southeast. Linguistic analysis adds weight to this account. The gap between Cherokee and the northern Iroquoian languages is relatively large, suggesting a split in the distant past. Glottochronology studies place that divergence somewhere between about 1500 and 1800 BCE.

  The second theory argues the opposite: that proto-Iroquoian itself developed in Appalachia, and it was the northern Iroquoian speakers who migrated away, not the Cherokee. Anthropologist Thomas R. Whyte, writing in 2007, proposed that the proto-Iroquoian language likely originated in the Appalachian region, and that the divergence between Northern and Southern Iroquoian languages began approximately 4,000 years ago. Under this view, the Cherokee were never migrants at all.

  Archaeological evidence threads through both theories. The peoples of the Middle Woodland period, believed to be ancestors of the historic Cherokee, occupied what is now western North Carolina from approximately 200 to 600 CE. They are thought to have built what is called the Biltmore Mound, found in 1984 south of the Swannanoa River on the Biltmore Estate. Later, the Pisgah phase of South Appalachian Mississippian culture, running from around 1000 to 1500 CE, is also considered ancestral. Whether the Cherokee arrived at these sites or grew from them remains a question that has not been fully resolved.

• 3. Towns, Trade, and Early Contact

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  In 1540 and 1541, the Spanish expedition led by Hernando de Soto passed through present-day South Carolina and into the mountains of western North Carolina, entering what the Cherokee consider their heartland. The Spanish recorded a people they called Chalaque living around the Keowee River, at the meeting point of western North Carolina, South Carolina, and northeastern Georgia. It is one of the earliest European written references to a Cherokee-speaking people.

  By the time of European contact, the Cherokee had organized their settlements into clusters of towns, each group occupying a distinct river valley. The Lower Towns sat along the Keowee River in present-day Oconee County, South Carolina, with Keowee as their principal town. Towns called Estatoe and Sugartown lay along the same waterway. In western North Carolina, the Valley, Middle, and Outer Towns spread along the Tuckasegee, the upper Little Tennessee, the Hiwasee, and the French Broad rivers. The Overhill Cherokee occupied the lower Little Tennessee River and upper Tennessee River on the western side of the Appalachians, in what is now southeastern Tennessee.

  The deerskin trade shaped Cherokee relationships with European colonists during the 17th and 18th centuries. Deer hides from the cooler mountain hunting grounds of the Cherokee were considered superior to those of the lowland coastal tribes, making the Cherokee valuable commercial partners. The earliest recorded Virginia trader to live among them was Cornelius Dougherty, in 1690. The traders who followed were nearly all of Scottish ancestry, many documented as Highland Scots, and a significant number married Cherokee women and stayed. Their mixed-race children later became significant leaders among what European Americans called the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast.

  In 1730, at the Cherokee town of Nikwasi, a Scots adventurer named Sir Alexander Cuming staged a ceremony that crowned Moytoy of Tellico as "Emperor" of the Cherokee and had him acknowledge King George II as Cherokee protector. Cuming then arranged for seven prominent Cherokee, including the young leader Attakullakulla, to travel to London, where they signed the Treaty of Whitehall with the British. The episode illustrated how the Cherokee were being drawn into a world of formal diplomatic theater that was not of their own making.

• 4. Smallpox, War, and Survival

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  In 1738 and 1739, smallpox moved through Cherokee towns with devastating force. The Cherokee had no immunity to the disease. Nearly half their population died within a year. Hundreds more, according to accounts from the period, took their own lives in the wake of losses and disfigurement. A population that had fielded an estimated 6,000 warriors in 1730 had been cut by the epidemic to 5,000 by 1740, according to Georgia colonial records, though some estimates suggest the actual warrior count fell far lower.

  British colonial officer Henry Timberlake, born in Virginia, visited the Cherokee in 1761 and left a detailed physical description. He wrote of men of a middle stature with olive complexions, ears slit and stretched in an elaborate fashion he traced to Shawnee influence, adorned with silver pendants, rings, and collars of wampum cut from clamshells. His account captured a society that had been absorbing and adapting outside influences for generations, even as it maintained distinct practices of its own.

  The 18th century brought recurring armed conflict. From 1753 to 1755, battles broke out between the Cherokee and the Muscogee over disputed hunting grounds in North Georgia, ending with Cherokee victory at the Battle of Taliwa at what is now Ball Ground, Georgia, in 1755. When the British built Fort Loudoun near Chota on the Tennessee River to counter French influence, the alliance frayed quickly. The resulting 1760 Anglo-Cherokee War left both sides damaged. King George III's Royal Proclamation of 1763 then formally barred British settlement west of the Appalachian crest, an attempt to shield the Cherokee and other allied tribes from colonial encroachment that the Crown found nearly impossible to enforce.

  By 1776, the Cherokee found themselves on the wrong side of a revolution. Allied with the Shawnee led by Cornstalk, they struck settlements in South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina. Provincial militias retaliated by destroying more than 50 Cherokee towns. North Carolina militia invaded and destroyed the Overhill towns in what is now Tennessee in both 1776 and 1780. Overhill Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe, who had refused to accept peace, withdrew with his band to Chickamauga Creek near present-day Chattanooga and fought a guerrilla campaign against settlers that continued until 1794, when the first Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse, signed on the 7th of November, finally ended the conflict.

• 5. A Nation Built on Paper

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  Around 1809, a silversmith named Sequoyah began working on a written form of the Cherokee language. He spoke no English. His experiences in trade with white settlers and as a warrior at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend convinced him that the Cherokee needed their own writing. In 1821, he introduced a syllabary of 85 characters, one for each syllable in the spoken language. It was the first written syllabic form of any American Indian language outside of Central America.

  The innovation spread with unusual speed. Cherokee traditionalists and white missionaries initially resisted it, both groups preferring English. But when Sequoyah taught children to read and write using the syllabary, the children taught their parents. By the 1820s, the Cherokee had achieved a literacy rate higher than that of the white population of Georgia surrounding them.

  The syllabary also made it possible to print. In February 1828, Elias Boudinot published the first edition of the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix at New Echota, which had become the capital of the Cherokee Nation in November 1825. It was the first American Indian newspaper. The press was established by the Vermont missionary Samuel Worcester and Boudinot, who had adopted the name of his white benefactor, a former leader of the Continental Congress and New Jersey Congressman. Together they translated the Bible into Cherokee syllabary.

  The political architecture matched this literary ambition. In 1827, the Cherokee Nation drafted a constitution modeled on that of the United States, with executive, legislative, and judicial branches and a system of checks and balances. The two-tiered legislature was led by Major Ridge and his son John Ridge. The legislature appointed John Ross as Principal Chief, convinced the tribe's survival required English-speaking leaders who could negotiate with the federal government. They had built, in a remarkably short time, a modern nation within a nation.

• 6. Removal and Its Aftermath

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  In 1829, gold was discovered at Dahlonega, on Cherokee land claimed by Georgia. That discovery accelerated what had been building for years. Georgia held a land lottery to distribute Cherokee territory to its citizens, and state militia occupied New Echota. When Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as president that same year, the Cherokee lost their most important ally in resisting Georgia's demands.

  In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing forcible relocation of American Indians east of the Mississippi. John Ross traveled to Washington and won support from National Republican leaders Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. In June 1830, a delegation led by Ross argued the Cherokee case before the U.S. Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. In 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that American Indian nations were "distinct, independent political communities retaining their original natural rights" entitled to federal protection from state interference. Jackson ignored the ruling.

  A faction within Cherokee leadership concluded that resistance was futile. Led by Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, the so-called Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota on the 29th of December, 1835, ceding all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for a large tract in Indian Territory, $5 million, and $300,000 for improvements on new lands. Ross gathered more than 15,000 signatures on a petition to the Senate arguing the treaty lacked popular mandate. The Senate passed it by a single vote. In 1836 it became law.

  Two years later, President Martin Van Buren ordered 7,000 federal troops and state militia under General Winfield Scott to enforce removal. Over 16,000 Cherokee were forced westward in 1838-1839, marching more than 800 miles across Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. As many as 4,000 died from disease, exposure, and starvation, a figure representing nearly a fifth of those relocated. The Cherokee call this Nvna Daula Tsvyi, the Trail Where They Cried. On the 22nd of June, 1839, a party of Ross supporters assassinated Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, fulfilling the tribe's "blood law" that prescribed death for those who sold Cherokee lands without authorization. Boudinot's brother, Stand Watie, survived by escaping to Arkansas.

• 7. Those Who Remained

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  The Cherokee living along the Oconaluftee River in the Great Smoky Mountains had always been the most conservative and the most isolated from European-American settlements. They had withdrawn from the Cherokee Nation in 1819, when the government ceded all territory east of the Little Tennessee River to North Carolina. When federal troops came to enforce removal, they were not among those swept away.

  Some resisted openly. More than 400 Cherokee either hid from federal troops in the remote Snowbird Mountains under the leadership of Tsali, or belonged to former Valley Towns communities around the Cheoah River who negotiated with the state to remain in North Carolina. An additional 400 stayed on reserves in southeastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, and northeastern Alabama as citizens of their respective states. A white store owner and state legislator from Jackson County, North Carolina, named William Holland Thomas helped over 600 Cherokee from Qualla Town obtain North Carolina citizenship, which legally exempted them from forced removal.

  These groups became the ancestors of what is now the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, based on the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina. In the late 19th century, they reorganized and achieved federal recognition as a tribe, though in the intervening decades they had been classified under Jim Crow-era laws on the "colored" side of a segregated society, subject to the same disenfranchisement as African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South.

  The Qualla Boundary today covers 100 square miles and is home to over 8,000 Cherokee. The Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, founded in 1946, became the country's oldest continuing Native American art cooperative. In 2007, the Eastern Band entered a partnership with Southwestern Community College and Western Carolina University to create the Oconaluftee Institute for Cultural Arts, offering an associate degree program emphasizing native art and culture in traditional fine arts education.

• 8. Civil War and Modern Nations

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  Stand Watie had survived the 1839 assassinations and would go on to become the most consequential Cherokee military figure of the 19th century. When the Civil War came in 1861, he raised a regiment for Confederate service. John Ross had reluctantly allied with the Confederacy as well, but Federal troops captured him in 1862. Ross spent the rest of the war in self-imposed exile in Philadelphia, supporting the Union cause.

  In Indian Territory, the national council of those who backed the Union voted to abolish slavery within the Cherokee Nation in 1863. Watie, elected Principal Chief of the pro-Confederacy majority, fought Union troops and Ross-aligned Cherokee in a punishing guerrilla campaign, capturing Union supply trains and steamboats and covering a Confederate retreat at the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862. He was eventually promoted to Brigadier General of the Confederate States, the only American Indian to hold that rank in the Confederate forces. On the 25th of June, 1865, two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Watie became the last Confederate General to stand down.

  After the war, the U.S. government required the Cherokee Nation to sign a new treaty, in part because of its Confederate alliance. The 1866 Treaty mandated the emancipation of all Cherokee slaves and full citizenship, with all the rights of native Cherokees, for Cherokee Freedmen and all African Americans who chose to remain on tribal lands. The Dawes Act of 1887 then broke up communally held tribal land into individual allotments, and the Curtis Act of 1898 dismantled tribal governments, courts, and schools entirely. The Five Civilized Tribes proposed the State of Sequoyah in 1905, an exclusively Native American state, but it found no support in Washington, D.C. In 1907, the Oklahoma and Indian Territories entered the union together as the state of Oklahoma.

  In 1975, the Cherokee Nation drafted a new constitution, ratified on the 26th of June, 1976. Today, the Cherokee Nation hosts the Cherokee National Holiday each Labor Day weekend, drawing between 80,000 and 90,000 citizens to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. On the 9th of July, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that roughly half the land area of Oklahoma constitutes tribal nation jurisdiction, a decision with profound implications for all five major tribes of former Indian Territory, including the Cherokee.