Читать книгу Beyond the Cherokee Trail - Lisa Carter - Страница 9

Reader’s Note

Reader’s Note

In 1835, members of a minority faction of the Cherokee Nation brokered a compromise settlement with the United States’ government known as the Treaty of New Echota, ceding its claims to the entire Cherokee Nation in the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. The treaty agreed to the removal of all Cherokee citizens to beyond the Mississippi River in Indian Territory. This deal—without the official authorization of the Cherokee National Council—became the legal basis for the enforced removal of an entire ethnic group from the only home in which their people had lived, farmed, and roamed for hundreds of years.

John Ross traveled between New Echota and Washington urging President Andrew Jackson to reconsider. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Davy Crockett among others argued for the Cherokees’ right to stay. But Congress ratified the agreement in 1836 in the face of mounting pressure to seize the valuable Cherokee lands. And although the Supreme Court upheld many of the Cherokee claims, the fate of the Cherokee Nation had been sealed once gold was discovered within its borders.

The government granted the Cherokees two years to prepare themselves to be removed. But Ross promised an eleventh-hour intervention. And so, in May 1838, most of the Cherokee were caught completely unaware. With crops planted in the field, laundry hanging on the line, breakfast waiting on the table . . . soldiers appeared at their doors.

Of the sixteen thousand removed—a virtual death march—six thousand men, women, and children perished along the twelve- hundred-mile route that became known as the Trail of Tears or Trail Where We Cried. The removal ensured the land, which had been their ancestral birthplace, would become nothing more than an oft-repeated story around hearth fires of a time and

a place revered and longed for, but outside the scope of living memory. The Trail came to symbolize the oppression of all Native Americans in the American expansion to the Pacific Ocean.

In the isolated mountain terrain of western North Carolina in what today comprises the Qualla Boundary near the town of Cherokee, some refused to surrender to removal. These few hundred became the Eastern Band of the Cherokee.

An even smaller number secreted in a pocket of the rugged Snowbird Mountains—still considered one of the last wilderness regions within the United States—also successfully eluded capture and became known as the Snowbird Cherokee . . . This is their story.