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ОглавлениеFurther Purchase of Cherokee Lands
On the 27th of May, 1816, the Secretary of War instructed Agent Meigs to endeavor, at the next session of the national council of the Cherokees, to obtain a cession of the Cherokee claim north of Tennessee River within the State of Tennessee. For this proposed cession he was authorized to pay $20,000, in one or more payments, and $5,000 in presents; also to give Colonel Lowry, an influential chief among them, a sum equal to the value of his improvements.218
He was further instructed to make an effort to secure the cession of the lands which they had declined to sell the previous winter and which lay to the west of a line drawn due south from that point of the Tennessee River intersected by the eastern boundary of Madison County, Alabama.
The necessity for these cessions, and especially that of the former tract, had been urged upon the Government of the United States by the legislature and by the citizens of Tennessee, many of whom had been purchasers of land within its limits, from the State of North Carolina, a quarter of a century previous, and who had been restrained from possession and occupancy of the same by the United States authorities so long as the Indian title remained unextinguished. In the event that the national council of the Cherokees should decline to accede to the desired cessions, Agent Meigs was to urge that the Cherokee delegation appointed to meet the boundary commissioners at the Chickasaw Council House on the 1st of September following should be invested with full authority for the conclusion of such adjustment of boundaries as might be determined on at that place. This authority was conditionally granted by the council,219 and when the delegation came to meet the United States commissioners at the Chickasaw Council House, in the month of September, an agreement was made as to boundaries as set forth in the second article of the treaty of September 14, 1816. By this agreement the Cherokees ceded all claim west of a line from Camp Coffee to the Coosa River and south of a line from the latter point to Flat Rock, on Bear Creek.220 The treaty was ratified by the nation in general council, at Turkeytown, on the 4th of October following.221
Alabama alleges error in survey.—When the due-south line from Camp Coffee provided for in the treaty was surveyed, the surveyor, through an error in running it, deflected somewhat to the west. When the adjacent country came to be surveyed and opened up to settlement much complaint was made, and the legislature of Alabama222 passed a joint resolution reciting the fact that through this erroneous survey much valuable land had been left within the Cherokee limits which had properly been ceded to the United States and instructing Alabama's delegation in Congress to take measures for having the line correctly run. The matter having been by Congress referred to the Secretary of War for investigation and report, the Commissioner of the General Land Office, at his request, reported223 that when the public surveys were made in that section it was found that neither the line due south from Camp Coffee nor from the head of Caney Creek had been surveyed on a true meridian. Inasmuch, however, as they had been run and marked by commissioners appointed by the United States, the surveyors necessarily made the public surveys in conformity to them. By this deviation from the true meridian the United States and the State of Alabama had gained more land from the manner in which the Caney Creek or Chickasaw boundary line had been run than had been lost by the deviation in the Cherokee or Camp Coffee line, and the quantity in either case did not perhaps exceed six or eight thousand acres.
