Some Wolves once caught the Rabbit and were going to eat him when he asked to show them a new dance he was practicing. They knew that the Rabbit was a strong song leader, and they wanted to learn the latest dance, so they agreed and made a ring about him while he got ready. He patted his feet and began to dance in a circle, singing:
Tlage situn gali sgi sida ha
Ha nia lil! lil! Ha nia lil! lil!
On the edge of the field I
dance about
Ha nia lil! lil!. Ha nia lil!
“Now,” said the Rabbit, “when I sing ‘on the edge of the field,’ I dance that way.” And he danced in that direction. “And when I sing ‘lil! lil!’ you must all stamp your feet hard.”
The Wolves thought it was fine. The Rabbit began another round, singing the same song, and danced a little nearer to the field, while the Wolves all stamped their feet. He sang louder and louder and danced nearer and nearer to the field until the fourth song. The Wolves were stamping as hard as they could and thinking only of the song, and he made one jump and was off through the long grass.
They were after him at once, but he ran for a hollow stump and climbed up on the inside. When the Wolves got there, one of them put his head inside to look up, but the Rabbit spit into his eye so that the Wolf had to pull his head out again. The others were afraid to try, and they went away with the Rabbit still in the stump.
* * *
After my family relocated in San Francisco, where the screams of sirens echoed off warehouse walls, I was very much like Rabbit, who found himself surrounded by Wolves. But unlike the clever Rabbit of the Cherokee myth, I had no song or dance to distract the Wolves in my life. Nor was there a hollow stump for me to crawl inside. There were not even a few blades of long grass for cover.
Wolves surrounded me. But my pursuers were not four-legged or fanged or covered with fur. They were of a species all their own. I was nagged by anxiety, doubt, and fear that silently crept from the city’s shadows with the thick bay fog to sit on window sills and hover at doors. The hushed voices were more terrible than any beast’s howls. I could not spit in my demons’ eyes to make them leave. It was impossible to escape them.
I was not accustomed to being with so many different people—people who generally did not accept my strange clothing and even stranger accent. There was literally no place for me to run and hide—at least, not at first. In those early days, when we were all trying to figure out how to get along, there was no real sanctuary for me. We were so far from Mankiller Flats and the wooded land I knew and loved. We might as well have been on the far side of the moon.
I was sad and lonesome most of the time. Having to grapple with the worries and pressures of big-city life and contend with the ordeals of adolescence were not pleasant experiences for a Cherokee girl from the Oklahoma outland. I knew only the country and country ways. I suffered from incurable homesickness aggravated by what felt like a permanent case of the blues. I thought my despair would never go away. Everything seemed hopeless.
I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.
Steve McQueen
My parents and the rest of the family helped me to survive. We all tried our best to help one another. Somehow, we managed to get through even the worst times. There also were other comforts. When the going got especially difficult, I allowed my mind to slip away to the past. Going back in time and space can sometimes help remedy a person’s troubles.
This is a technique that I developed more fully when I was older and had learned more about my tribe’s history. Today, I often consider the old days of the Cherokees. I allow myself to think about “the trail where they cried,” and the federal government’s forced removal of our people and the other southeastern tribes. I compare their upheaval in the late 1830s to my own family’s relocation in the 1950s. Remembering those Cherokees and others who were forced to move to Indian Territory and how they persisted brings me at least some relief whenever I feel distressed or afraid. Through the years, I have learned to use my memory and the historical memory of my people to help me endure the most difficult and trying periods of my life.
We are now about to take our leave and kind farewell to our native land, the country that the great spirit gave our Fathers, we are on the eve of leaving that country that gave us birth … it is with sorrow that we are forced by the authority of the white man to quit the scenes of our childhood … we bid a final farewell to it and all we hold dear.
George Hicks, Cherokee leader on the Trail of Tears
November 4, 1838
That is why I continue to think about the past and to circle back to my tribal history for doses of comfort. I still contemplate the lives of my ancestors—some of those early transplants who became part of the Cherokee Nation West. That all took place long before the conclusion of the Treaty of New Echota of 1835—the controversial document that provided for the Cherokees’ shameful eviction from our ancestral lands, and the tribe’s inevitable removal to an alien region. The experiences of those who made that journey to Indian Territory remain an unrivaled lesson in courage and hope.
I also reflect on those times before the white men and the United States government took control of our lives, when the Cherokees thrived in the ancient homeland of what became Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. I see in my mind’s eye the steady European intrusion, and how the old Cherokee people gradually blended their timeless customs with the concoctions and innovations of the whites. I visualize the events that marked those years when my people were pressured to move from the Southeast to the unknown lands west of Arkansas. Remembrances can be powerful teachers. When we return to our history, those strong images assist us in learning how not to make identical mistakes. Perhaps we will not always be doomed to repeat all of our history, especially the bad episodes.
From the annals of time, from those bittersweet years of the 1800s, the spirits of long-dead Cherokees and other native men and women from other tribes remain unsettled. Their spirits still cry out, warning us about the dangers that lie ahead. They speak of the need to read small print on documents and to search between the lines on treaties. They caution us to be aware of the droves of government bureaucrats who tend to approach native people just as those well-meaning “Bless Your Heart” ladies did in Oklahoma, the ones who tried to coax me into their big shiny cars when I was a child walking down a dirt road to school.
The spirits admonish us to be careful. They draw from their own knowledge and experience, no doubt recalling the snares and pitfalls uncovered along the way when they became “civilized” and struggled to retain some dignity and appease the white ruling class. Through the spirits’ chiding, we become aware that the “civilizing” of the Cherokees did us much more harm than good in many ways. We look back on those times and, if we allow ourselves, we can learn so much.
Although many Cherokees tried to stay with the old ways, especially regarding clan dances and medicine, some adopted at least what seemed the most ideal elements of the white man’s world. That is why, among our people, some became farmers, merchants, and traders. They dressed like whites. They lived in log cabins, sent their children to schools, attended Christian churches, and adopted written laws. For the most part, they abandoned many of the old traditions and customs that the whites frowned on and considered pagan and offensive.
Some Cherokees, mostly the prosperous mixed-bloods, began to treat women as second-class citizens, kept black slaves, and even owned large plantations. Some Cherokee leaders believed that if our people would only adopt the beliefs and lifestyle of the white Americans, we would be allowed to survive as a tribe in our own homeland. Perhaps the whites would leave us alone. Just maybe the song and dance would work, and the Wolves would let Rabbit be. That proved to be a costly mistake in judgment.
As early as the 1820s, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks were becoming known by some whites as the “Civilized Tribes.” Eventually, the Seminoles would be added to those ranks. By the late 1850s, long after all the tribes had been removed on their individual trails of tears to Indian Territory, they put aside most of their old antagonisms toward one another. They would be referred to as the “Five Civilized Tribes.” Those three words—“Five Civilized Tribes”—continue to be a pejorative term still in use to this day, even by some Native Americans.
The Cherokees were able to live effectively in the Cherokee world as well as in the white world. To white society, that meant our people were the most acculturated, although we still were not—and never would be—placed on the same level as the whites. Still, the Cherokee mixed-bloods were accepted in many white circles, and their influence in the tribal communities increased. Mixed-blood surnames such as Adair, Ward, Rogers, Vann, Lowery, and Ross became well established in our tribe.
By the 1820s, the mixed-bloods, some of them with blue eyes and light hair, had acquired most of the tribal wealth. Even though they still had to share their power with the full-bloods, they held at least 40 percent of the Cherokee government posts. Although the majority of the white blood in members of the tribe came from the male side, an 1824 Cherokee Nation census noted seventy-three white women as the spouses of Cherokee men, and 147 white men as husbands of Cherokee women.
The impact of the mixed-bloods and the influence of Christian missionaries became increasingly evident. Charles Hicks, one of our tribe’s mixed-blood leaders and author some of the first written Cherokee laws, adopted by the tribal council in 1808, was the chief who gave his approval to the establishment of churches and schools in Cherokee communities. “Our very existence depends upon it,” Hicks reportedly told a missionary.
Early on in the nineteenth century, some of our people’s spiritual needs were ministered to by various white missionaries, starting with a small group of Moravians who established a mission in Georgia in 1801. Other white Christian missionaries—Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Quaker—all anxious to “save the savages,” soon moved into our homeland. They built churches and mission schools where, in most instances, academic lessons were supplemented with an abundance of hymn singing, public prayers, and Scripture readings.
How can we trust you? When Jesus Christ came on earth, you killed him and nailed him to a cross.
Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, 1810
In 1819, as part of the government’s commitment to “civilize” all native people, Congress authorized an annual sum of $10,000 to the War Department to support and promote the civilization of Indians by employing “capable persons of good moral character, to instruct them in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation; and for teaching their children in reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Without fail, our tribe received the largest proportion of this fund each year. The five schools in the Cherokee Nation in 1809 had increased to eighteen by 1825, with the enrollment climbing from ninety-four to 314 students. There also were many mission schools, where besides the “three Rs,” the standard curriculum included Bible and catechism study. Graduates of the mission schools, mostly those with more white than Cherokee blood, often were sent to colleges or academies in New England.
Typical of the religious literature of that era was a tract entitled A Discourse or Lecture on the subject of Civilizing the Indians, in which is exhibited a New Plan to Effect their Civilization and to Meliorate their Condition. Published in 1826 in Washington, D.C., by the Reverend J. Darneille, former rector of Amherst Parish, Virginia, the thirty-six-page pamphlet sold for a dollar per copy, a tidy sum in those days. The author, mindful of marketing strategy, explained up front that “if the intrinsic value of the work be overrated, yet you will have the pleasure of making this small donation to civilize and instruct the Indians; to remunerate and return to them, in this way, some indemnity for the fair and fertile country which you now possess and enjoy on the shores of the Atlantic, their rightful inheritance, from which their ancestors were driven by ours, and for which, in justice to them, your sympathy for their sufferings, and your bounty for their relief, can never be misapplied.”
Darneille’s primary intent in publishing the slim volume was to suggest the establishment of a missionary school and farm among the Old Settler Cherokees living in Arkansas. He also proposed taking his own family to the Cherokee Nation West so he could oversee the Indian school and preach the gospel to the “heathens.” If Darneille would have had access to a time machine to make a forward journey to 130 years later in Oklahoma, he unquestionably would have fit right in with those “Bless Your Heart” ladies in Adair County. And no doubt those ladies—dressed to the nines for all to see—would have been in the first-row pew of his church every Sunday morning. Like those opinionated Oklahoma ladies, the pious Reverend Darneille had nothing but sympathy for the Cherokees, a sympathy that reflected his patronizing concern for what he perceived to be our “plight.”
Darneille and the other sanctimonious do-gooders of that period did not have the slightest clue about the workings of the Native American culture and belief system. “The scourge of their lives pursue and seem to afflict them even after death,” Darneille wrote in his treatise. “Nature prompts the survivors to bury their dead, but of this they are deprived for want of instruments to open the earth. They, therefore, enclose the body with bark, and suspend it as high as they can on a tree.”
The Reverend Darneille’s pamphlet was not published in Cherokee, although by 1826, the Cherokee syllabary, publicly demonstrated a few years earlier, had been printed for the first time.
Most historians credit Sequoyah, the most famous Cherokee, with the invention of the syllabary. However, some oral historians contend that the written Cherokee language is much, much older. But even if there was an ancient written Cherokee language, it was lost to the Cherokees until Sequoyah developed the syllabary. The development of the syllabary was one of the events which was destined to have a profound influence on our tribe’s future history. This extraordinary achievement marks the only known instance of an individual creating a totally new system of writing.
Born in the 1770s in the Cherokee village of Tuskegee on the Tennessee River, Sequoyah was a mixed-blood whose mother, Wureth, belonged to the Paint Clan. Sometimes the young man was known by his English name, George Gist or Guess, a legacy from his white father. Sequoyah, reared in the old tribal ways and customs, became a hunter and fur trader. He was also a skilled silver craftsman who never learned to speak, write, or read English. However, he was always fascinated with the white people’s ability to communicate with one another by making distinctive marks on paper—what some native people referred to as “talking leaves.”
Handicapped from a hunting accident and therefore having more time for contemplation and study, Sequoyah supposedly set about to devise his own system of communication in 1809. He devoted the next dozen years to his task, taking time out to serve as a soldier in the War of 1812 and the Creek War. Despite constant ridicule, criticism from friends and even family members, and accusations that he was insane or practicing witchcraft, Sequoyah became obsessed with his work on the Cherokee language.
It is said that in ancient times, when writing first began, a man named Moses made marks upon a stone. I, too, can make marks upon a stone. I can agree with you by what name to call those marks and that will be writing and can be understood.
Attributed to Sequoyah
Some historians say that ultimately Sequoyah determined the Cherokee language was made up of particular clusters of sounds and combinations of vowels and consonants. The eighty-five characters in the syllabary represent all the combination of vowel and consonant sounds that form our language. In 1821, Sequoyah’s demonstration of the system before a gathering of astonished tribal leaders was so dramatically convincing that it promptly led to the official approval of the syllabary.
Within several months of Sequoyah’s unveiling of his invention, a substantial number of people in the Cherokee Nation reportedly were able to read and write in their own language. Many mixed-bloods were already literate in English, but the syllabary made it possible for virtually everyone in the Cherokee Nation, young and old, to master our language in a relatively short period of time.
The Christian missionaries opposed the new syllabary at first, but later saw how it could be used to further their conversion work. Soon, they made sure that laboriously copied Cherokee translations of the Bible and other religious works were being distributed among our people. Our tribal council was resolved to put the syllabary to good use in other ways also. Stimulated by this achievement, our entire tribe advanced rapidly, much to the chagrin of those whites who still regarded all native people, even those with “book learning,” as pests who stood in the way of the whites’ progress.
In 1827, the Cherokee council appropriated funding for the establishment of a national newspaper. Early the following year, the hand press and syllabary characters in type were shipped by water from Boston and transported overland the last two hundred miles by wagon to our capital of New Echota, established two years before in Georgia. Elias Boudinot, whose true name was Buck Watie, or Galagina, “the Buck,” was selected as the first editor. Formally educated in Connecticut, Watie took the name Elias Boudinot after becoming friends with a Revolutionary War hero of the same name, who had written a book claiming that the Cherokees were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.
The inaugural issue of the newspaper, Tsa la gi Tsu lehisanunhi or the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in parallel columns in Cherokee and English, appeared on February 21, 1828. It was the first Indian newspaper published in the United States.
The name given to the newspaper was a fitting choice. The power of that mythical bird—which was swallowed by flames but rose from its ashes—reminds us of the Cherokees’ eternal flame. It has come through broken treaties, neglected promises, wars, land grabs, epidemics, and tribal splits. According to our legend, as long as that fire burns, our people will survive.
We would now commit our feeble efforts to the good will and indulgence of the public … hoping for that happy period when all the Indian tribes of America shall arise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes, and when the terms “Indian depredation,” “war whoop,” “scalping knife,” and the like, shall become obsolete.
Elias Boudinot’s first editorial
Cherokee Phoenix, February 21, 1828
A written Cherokee Constitution, adopted on July 26, 1827, by a convention of elected delegates from the eight districts whose representatives had gathered at New Echota, was produced in both languages on the new national printing press. Modeled after the United States Constitution, the document provided for three branches of government, two legislative houses, a legal system that included a supreme court and jury system for trials, and a national police force to enforce our written laws. It boldly proclaimed the existence of an independent Cherokee Nation with complete dominion over our tribal lands in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama.
Some of our people frequently single out the many positive events of the late 1820s as the high point of the Cherokee Renaissance, from the conclusion of our war with the Creek people in 1814 to the mid-1830s. In terms of lifestyle and culture, the Cherokees had a highly developed society, as opposed to the largely ignorant frontier riffraff in the South, made up of many whites who envied Indian achievements, coveted their land and, generally, treated them as savages. The great majority of white political leaders and citizens from Georgia—the nerve center of the Cherokee Nation—had no respect for native people. They found the concept of “civilized” Indians and the notion of Cherokees forming their own republic most offensive; such radical ideas only served to undercut the proposed federal removal policy.
More important to the white Georgians, gold was discovered in July of 1828 on Ward’s Creek near the present town of Dahlonega, not far from New Echota in the heart of Cherokee country. De Soto’s dream seemed to be coming true. The discovery of gold caused even more of a stampede of white settlers into the region. More than ever, the whites clamored for the removal of the Indians. Georgia’s political vanguard immediately began to draft restrictive legislation. Our tribal leaders did not dare to admit it, but the fate of the Cherokee Nation was sealed. The old myth about Rabbit and his Wolf enemies suddenly applied. But this time, Wolves were all around, and Rabbit’s song and dance did not divert the enemies’ attention. Even trying to act like Wolves and mimicking their way of life did not work. Wolves pressed in, and Rabbit had no place to run.
Besides the discovery of gold, Georgians remained alarmed because of the adoption of the written Cherokee Constitution asserting that our people were independent and had complete jurisdiction over our own territory. A further complication for our people loomed on the horizon—the election of Andrew Jackson as president of the United States in 1828. An intensely ambitious Tennessean and proud son of the southern frontier, the cunning Jackson was a seasoned “Indian fighter,” an outspoken advocate of Indian removal, and a well-known antagonist of the Cherokees.
Just a month before “Old Hickory” won the presidential election in November of 1828, John Ross—the primary author of our constitution and a tireless guardian of Cherokee rights—was elected as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, an office he would be reelected to until his death in 1866. Although only one-eighth Cherokee, Ross always will be remembered as one of our most remarkable chiefs, a dedicated and beloved leader who became the hope of the Cherokees as the whites swept our people forever from our rightful land.
Ross was born in 1790 at Turkeytown in what is now northern Alabama. His mother was Molly McDonald, a quarter-blood Cherokee and the daughter of the Tory agent among the Chickamaugas. Ross’s father was Daniel Ross, a Scottish immigrant who was traveling through Cherokee country on a trading mission before the American Revolution when he encountered a war party of Dragging Canoe, the fearless Chickamauga warrior. The warriors spared Daniel Ross’s life and made him a member of the Cherokee Nation. Two years later, he married Molly. John was their oldest son, the third of nine children.
Even though John Ross was seven-eighths Scottish, it is important to note that the influence of the United States government in the area of identifying Indians by degrees of native blood had not yet had its effect on our tribe. To the Cherokee mind at that time, one’s identity as Cherokee depended solely on clan affiliation. Ross’s mixed-blood mother was a Cherokee by definition because she and her sisters were members of the Bird Clan. Cherokee children belong to their mother’s clan and retain membership for life, so Ross, too, was a Cherokee of the Bird Clan.
Ross’s Cherokee name was Guwi Sguwi, usually spelled Cooweescoowee, referring to a legendary white bird. Although Ross and his siblings were raised by their father “like white aristocrats,” as one writer put it, they were ardently Cherokee at heart. After his mother’s death, the family moved to Georgia, where the diminutive Ross—with fair skin, reddish hair, and blue eyes—was well educated by tutors and at schools. He became a polished gentleman and eloquent speaker. He married a Cherokee named Quatie, whose English name was Elizabeth Brown Henley. Ross established a trading post, operated a ferry, and became a successful merchant and planter. He also served as an aide and confidant to tribal leaders.
During the War of 1812, Ross and hundreds of other Cherokees sided with the Americans and fought against the British and their Creek allies. Ross, along with adopted Cherokee Sam Houston and Tennessee frontier scout Davy Crockett, served under Andrew Jackson in 1814 at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, when a Cherokee warrior saved Jackson’s life. Houston and Crockett remained on friendly terms with our people, and later vehemently opposed our tribe’s removal westward. Jackson, however, proved to have little appreciation for the help he had received from the Cherokees.
I have long viewed treaties with the Indians an absurdity not to be reconciled to the principles of our government.
Andrew Jackson
Letter to President James Monroe, 1817
By 1817, Ross, already actively involved in tribal politics as a member of the Cherokee National Council, advocated tribal unity and opposed the ceding of any more Cherokee land to the whites. Later, he chaired the Cherokee National Committee, and in 1827, he helped to draft our Cherokee Constitution while serving as president of the constitutional convention. Beloved by the majority of Cherokees, or “the people” as he preferred to call his kinsmen, Ross favored taking “the white man’s road” in the hope that an acceleration in “acculturation” would fortify the Cherokee Nation, bolstering its position in the eyes of white Americans.
Sadly, this strategy of adopting white culture backfired. The policy of appeasement failed to satisfy anyone. As a result, the strength of our people diminished, especially given the increased influence of the mixed-blood population, which also greatly changed the status of Cherokee women. The clan system and the time-honored practice of descent through maternal lines began to erode. The Cherokee Constitution further limited women’s rights by excluding them from all government offices and prohibiting them from voting. Cherokee women were expected to become subservient and domesticated like white women, who were home oriented.
When Ross became principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1828, he at once set about to demonstrate to the whites that our nation was, as the Cherokee Phoenix claimed, “a land of civil and religious means.” But Ross faced the dilemma of having to deal with angry white Georgians who were plainly outraged by what they considered to be the impudence of the Cherokee claims outlined in our constitution. Those whites found a vigorous champion in Washington, D.C., in the person of President Jackson, who took office in March of 1829.
In his first message to Congress, Jackson candidly informed the Cherokees that they could not expect any support for their constitutional position. He contended that Indians had no right to occupy land within the United States, and that it was only because of the government’s generosity that native people had any land at all. He and his supporters urged the rapid passage of legislation to enable the southeastern tribes to be removed as soon as possible to lands in the West.
After bitter debate, Jackson’s backers in Congress pushed through, by a narrow margin, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, authorizing the president to establish districts west of the Mississippi to exchange for Indian-held lands in the Southeast. Jackson immediately signed the bill into law. The seeds of removal sowed by Thomas Jefferson years before had taken root. The Cherokee Nation—Jackson’s former ally—and other native people of the Five Tribes were about to reap the bitter harvest.
The removal bill became the law of the land despite pleas from Davy Crockett. His opposition to Jackson’s Indian policy supposedly cost him reelection to Congress as a Democrat later that year. Although he returned as a Whig two years later and served another term, Crockett eventually left in search of further adventure in Texas, where his legend was burned into eternity when he perished at the siege of the Alamo in 1836. Besides the much mythologized Crockett, others also opposed Indian removal, including noteworthy political leaders of conscience such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.
After the passage of the removal act, Jackson arranged for a meeting of the southern tribes in hopes that he would be able to convince them to obey the new law. The Cherokees refused to attend, but the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws sent delegations. In the next two years, those three tribes signed individual treaties of removal. They soon found themselves severed from their homes in Mississippi and Alabama, headed west on their own paths of tears and misery to Indian Territory. Many died on the journey.
The Seminoles fought removal by taking up arms and ensconcing themselves in the Florida Everglades, where they engaged in a guerrilla war against the United States Army for almost eight years. Some Seminoles were finally removed to the West. Those who remained in their Everglades refuge refused to make peace with the government officially. They became known as “the tribe which never surrendered.” Although the Cherokees also refused to give in to the whites, they did not wish to go to war. Our leaders were convinced that it was imperative to maintain independence through peaceful methods.
Even before the removal legislation was enacted, the Georgia legislature had passed a series of anti-Cherokee measures. The worst of those statutes nullified all our people’s laws, confiscated Cherokee property and gold, and prohibited native people from testifying in court. It also forbade whites to live among the Cherokees without first swearing an oath of allegiance to Georgia, made it illegal for an Indian to speak out against immigration to the West, and provided for a survey of Cherokee land and a lottery to distribute that land to white Georgians.
Most of our leaders, especially Chief John Ross, were determined to resist. They traveled to Washington and appealed to President Jackson, but to no avail. They did not give up. They tried again. They were committed to mend the wounds and restore our people’s balance.
Among our old notables at that time was Gulkalaski, a great warrior acquainted with Jackson from years before at the bloody clash against the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend. He was the Cherokee known for supposedly having saved Jackson’s life by slaying a Creek warrior who had Jackson at his mercy. Aware of those circumstances, Chief Ross sent Gulkalaski to Washington to appeal to Jackson. But the ploy did not help. After he heard Gulkalaski’s petition, Jackson reportedly snapped at him., “Sir, your audience is ended, there is nothing I can do for you.” One version of the tale is that after being refused help, Gulkalaski uttered, “Detsinulahungu,” which means “I tried, but could not.” After that, he was always known as Tsunu lahunski, or “One who tries, but fails.”
If I had known that Jackson would drive us from our homes, I would have killed him at the Horseshoe.
Attributed to Tsunu Iahunski,
on the Trail of Tears
Editorials in the Cherokee Phoenix attacking the removal policy were reprinted in newspapers across the United States and Europe. Ministers in Boston, New York, and other large cities preached fiery sermons based on the editorials. Some of our tribe’s most eloquent speakers brought the Cherokee case to the public by lecturing throughout the northern states. Proficient in political and legal matters, Chief Ross made frequent trips to Washington to confer with the nation’s leading statesmen and power brokers, including Jackson, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, and John Calhoun. Nothing changed, however. Jackson would not be swayed. Finally, our tribal leaders had no recourse but to turn to the United States Supreme Court. Ross and his followers were confident that the Court would intercede on behalf of the Cherokee Nation and foil the plans of Jackson and other foes of the Indians.
In 1831, the case of the Cherokee Nation v. Georgia was finally heard by the Supreme Court. Lawyers hired by the tribe urged the learned justices to uphold our rights. They argued that Georgia could not legally enforce its laws in Cherokee country, and that Jackson and the government had no authority to forcibly evict our people from their own land. Cherokee counsel, maintaining that the tribe was a sovereign nation, sought an injunction against Georgia’s encroachment on Indian property in violation of treaty guarantees.
On March 18, 1831, Chief Justice John Marshall, in handing down the Court’s decision, effectively sidestepped the issue. He broadly hinted that he and his fellow justices considered the Cherokee Nation as “a distinct political society separated from others, capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself.” But even though he was sympathetic to the Cherokee cause, Marshall was also aware that a ruling in behalf of the tribe would have the authority of the Supreme Court. That meant if the Court could not enforce its own decree in behalf of the Cherokees, its authority would be compromised. In writing for the majority, Marshall held that the Cherokee Nation was a “domestic dependent nation,” or a ward of the federal government, and therefore could not bring suit in federal courts. Georgia state law still applied to our people.
Disappointed, but far from ready to admit total defeat, our leaders continued to believe that the Supreme Court was the Cherokees’ best protector of tribal rights. They did not have long to wait before another test of those rights came before the Court. When the Reverend Samuel Austin Worcester and Elizur Butler, white missionaries living among the Cherokees in Georgia, refused to take the oath of allegiance to the state, they were arrested and charged as felons. Tried and convicted, the two men were sentenced to four years of hard labor. Worcester appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
In 1832, the Supreme Court suddenly reversed itself in the celebrated Worcester v. State of Georgia. This time, the Court found that Indian nations were capable of making treaties, and that under the United States Constitution, such treaties were the supreme law of the land. They ruled that the federal government had exclusive jurisdiction within the borders of the Cherokee Nation, and that state law had no power within those boundaries. The Georgia statute was declared unconstitutional.
Georgia officials were furious. They responded by denying the Court’s jurisdiction and refusing to obey the judgment. A Supreme Court special mandate that ordered Worcester’s release from prison was also ignored. A devoted clergyman who later moved to Indian Territory before the Cherokees were finally forced to leave the Southeast, Worcester languished in a Georgia prison for almost another year before he was released.
The federal government, beset by technicalities concerning enforcement, was stymied from further action. Jackson, of course, refused to help. He simply disregarded the judgment, declaring that “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” Jackson also supposedly made the sarcastic pronouncement, “John Marshall has made his law; now let him enforce it.”
Cherokees and other native people remained at the mercy of the whites, who continued to seize Indian property, then being divided into lots of 160 acres and gold lots of forty acres and parceled out in the lottery to white Georgia citizens. In the spring of 1834, during one of John Ross’s many treks to Washington on behalf of his people, his fine estate was confiscated. He and his ailing wife moved their children and possessions into a small cabin across the border in Tennessee.
The situation, exacerbated by the dismal outcome of the tribe’s two major Supreme Court cases and by Andrew Jackson’s reelection in 1832, was enough to convince some Cherokees that they could do nothing more to halt the removal process. Some Cherokees, on their own volition, moved west to join the Old Settlers. As morale continued to deteriorate, a minority faction of our tribe began to support the official surrender of Cherokee land to Georgia while a deal could still be struck with the whites.
Surprisingly, the majority of the dissident faction once had been violently opposed to removal. They rather abruptly changed their minds after they became convinced that the tribe’s only choice was to pull an about-face and move elsewhere or risk annihilation. The group was led by Major Ridge, a powerful Cherokee orator, his ambitious son, John, and Ridge’s nephew, Elias Boudinot, or Buck Watie. In 1832, Boudinot had resigned as editor of the Cherokee Phoenix under pressure from Ross when Boudinot had begun to write editorials that seemed to support immigration. To Ross, the public discussion of the removal question was contradictory to the traditional Cherokee approach to resolving political disputes. The two Ridges and Boudinot were joined by Boudinot’s younger brother Stand Watie, who later became a brigadier general in the Confederate Army and a political rival of John Ross. Those who were proponents of signing a removal treaty with the whites became known as the Ridge Party or, eventually, the Treaty Party. Considered traitors by Ross and most of our tribe, they thought of themselves as true patriots.
Some historians have inferred that the pro-removal mavericks in the Ridge Party were inspired as much by their own ambitions as by true concern for the tribe. Grace Steele Woodward, in her book, The Cherokees, suggests that there was a conspiracy of sorts between the Ridge Party and the authorities in Georgia. According to Woodward, the Ridge followers felt that they knew what was best for the Cherokee Nation and were willing to bypass the tribal process for their own benefit. Whatever their motivations, members of the Ridge Party had little support within the Cherokee Nation. Although the tribe was becoming more divided on the issue, the majority of Cherokees adamantly opposed removal. They remained loyal to Chief John Ross and the Ross Party.
The Ross majority and the rival Ridge faction continued to send independent delegations to Washington to hammer out an agreement. Early in 1835, with the Ridge Party completely in favor of removal, Jackson appointed the Reverend John F. Schermerhorn, a retired Dutch minister whom most Cherokees called “Devil’s Horn,” as treaty commissioner to our tribe. It was Jackson’s hope and Schermerhorn’s intent to arrange for an acceptable removal treaty as expeditiously as possible. The treaty that resulted was rejected in October of 1835 by the Cherokee Nation, meeting in full council. The Ridge followers went off to lick their wounds and to scheme. Later that year, Ross again prepared to go to the nation’s capital to negotiate on behalf of the tribe for more favorable terms.
In a blinding rainstorm on the evening of December 5, twenty-five members of the Georgia Guard—a band of whites on horseback who had recently confiscated the Cherokee Phoenix press—crossed into Tennessee and swept down on the Ross family’s cabin. They arrested Ross and his houseguest, John Howard Payne, a playwright and the composer of “Home, Sweet Home,” who was gathering material for a book about the Cherokees. The guard seized Payne’s manuscript and Ross’s personal documents, and carted the two men off to a squalid log cabin in Georgia that served as a jail. Shackled near them was the son of the speaker of the Cherokee tribal council. Ross and Payne remained in chains for almost two weeks before they were released, without any charges having been lodged against them. The undaunted Ross finally reached Washington, but while he was there, Schermerhorn organized a parley of the pro-removal council members at New Echota to sign the rejected Ridge treaty.
On December 29, 1835, fewer than five hundred Cherokees of a tribal population of at least seventeen thousand answered the summons to appear at New Echota. Despite the overwhelming opposition, twenty-one proponents of Cherokee removal, including most notably Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and Stand Waite, scrawled their names or left X marks on the document. Not a single elected tribal officer signed the contentious covenant. However, as a result of the fraudulently obtained Treaty of New Echota, the Cherokee Nation relinquished to the United States all of its remaining land east of the Mississippi River for $5 million. The Treaty Party also agreed to leave the Southeast within two years of the treaty’s ratification and move west to Indian Territory, the land that was guaranteed to be ours forever.
Ross protested the treaty “in the name of God and the Cherokee Nation.” The Cherokee National Council denounced it as fraudulent. Ross again journeyed to Washington, bearing a petition of protest signed by many thousands of Cherokees. Jackson—granitelike—would not be moved. In spite of the evidence that the tribe’s constituted authorities and most Cherokee people were firmly opposed, Congress ratified the removal treaty on May 23, 1836, with a one-vote majority. Bands of our people, including the Treaty Party leaders and some of the Christian missionaries, eventually left for the West. Chief Ross and his followers—the greater part of the Cherokee tribe—remained in the Southeast. They continued to resist removal and to speak out against the treaty, which they branded as a sham.
When the federal government’s designated deadline for the Cherokees to leave the Southeast arrived in the spring of 1838, very few of our people—only about two thousand—had “voluntarily” vacated their homeland. Anxious for the removal to begin, the War Department dispatched army units with orders to help supervise the forcible expulsion of all remaining Cherokees. Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor as president, was no different than those who had come before him. “No state can achieve proper culture, civilization, and progress in safety as long as Indians are permitted to remain,” Van Buren stated. He sent General Winfield Scott to the Cherokee Nation to carry out the terms of the treaty and to direct the removal operations.
Although Scott, who considered his assignment distasteful, gave strict orders for the troops to conduct the removal process in a considerate and humane manner, there were many reports of soldiers dragging Cherokees from their cabins and fields at bayonet point. Homes were looted and crops burned; women and girls were raped. Mixed-blood girls, whom the white soldiers found more desirable, were passed from man to man like bottles of whiskey. Just as the other southern tribes had lost thousands of victims to cholera, pneumonia, and exposure during their confinement and forced removal to the West, the Cherokees also experienced wholesale hardship and brutality.
I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever saw.
Georgia volunteer Z. A. Zele, later a
Confederate colonel, reflecting on the 1838 removal
Without sufficient clothing or food and water, our people were rounded up like cattle and placed in stockades where they awaited departure for Indian Territory. Some groups made the journey by riverboat, but most were forced to go overland on foot or horseback. Ill and elderly people were permitted to ride in crowded wagons. Several hundred Cherokees managed to evade the soldiers. They escaped to the mountains and remained in hiding.
After witnessing the heavy loss of life among the captive tribal members, Ross urged General Scott to allow him to supervise the removal of approximately seventeen thousand Cherokees, a few whites, free black people, and slaves. It should be remembered that hundreds of people of African ancestry also walked the Trail of Tears with the Cherokees during the forced removal of 1838–1839. Although we know about the terrible human suffering of our native people and the members of the other tribes during the removal, we rarely hear of those black people who also suffered.
Being acquainted with many of the Indians and able to fluently speak their language, I was sent as interpreter into the Smoky Mountains country in May 1838, and witnessed the execution of the most brutal order in the history of American warfare.
I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into … wagons and start toward the west.
One can never forget the sadness and solemnity that morning. Chief John Ross led in prayer and when the bugle sounded and the wagons started rolling many of the children rose to their feet and waved their little hands good-bye to their mountain homes, knowing they were leaving them forever.
John G. Burnett, former army private
Eightieth birthday story, December 11, 1890
Although Jackson had warned Van Buren not to yield to Chief Ross, Van Buren followed Scott’s advice and agreed to Ross’s request to supervise the removal himself. In October of 1838, the first organized contingent of one thousand Cherokees began the twelve-hundred-mile westward trek. By March of 1839, twelve more groups had followed.
Altogether, at least four thousand Cherokees died in the detention camps or along the way. Among those who perished was Quatie Ross, the wife of Chief Ross. A witness of the Trail of Tears later said that Quatie gave her only blanket to a sick child, soon developed pneumonia, and died on a bitterly cold night. She was buried far from her mountain home.
… murder is murder whether committed by the villain in the dark or by uniformed men stepping to the strains of martial music. Murder is murder and somebody must answer, somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country in the summer of 1838. Somebody must explain the four thousand silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile. I wish I could forget it all, but the picture of … wagons lumbering over the frozen ground with their cargo of suffering humanity still lingers in my memory.
John G. Burnett, December 11, 1890