Cherokee
The Cherokee ( ah-ni-yv-wi-ya in the Cherokee language) are a people from North America, who at the time of European contact in the 1600s, inhabited what is now the Eastern and Southeastern United States. Most were forcibly moved westward to the Ozark Plateau. They were one of the tribes referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, they are the most numerous of the 563 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.[1]
History
Prehistoric and Protohistoric periods
In describing the history of Indians living in the interior of the American southeast, scholars use the term prehistory for the time before the mid-1500s, when several Spanish expeditions journeyed through the southeast. After these expeditions the European historic record is silent until about 1700. The term protohistory is used for this period. The time after about 1700 is called the historic era.
Since historic documentation is generally lacking, Cherokee prehistory and protohistory has been studied via oral tradition, linguistic analysis, and archaeology.
Unlike most other Indians of the American southeast at the start of the historic era, the Cherokee spoke an Iroquoian language. Since the Great Lakes region was the core of Iroquoian languages, it is theorized that the Cherokee migrated south from the Great Lakes region. Linguistic analysis shows a relatively large difference between Cherokee and the northern Iroquoian languages, suggesting a split in the distant past.[2] Glottochronology studies suggest the split occurred between about 1,500 and 1,800 B.C.[3]
The ancient settlement of Keetoowah or giduwa, on the Tuckasegee River near present-day Bryson City, North Carolina, is frequently cited as the original Cherokee City.[2]
During the early historic era, Europeans wrote of several Cherokee town groups, usually using the terms Lower, Middle, and Overhill towns. The Lower towns were situated on the headwater streams of the Savannah River, mainly in present-day western South Carolina and northeastern Georgia. Keowee was one of the chief towns. The Middle towns were located in present western North Carolina, on the headwater streams of the Tennessee River, such as the Little Tennessee River, Hiwassee River, and French Broad River. Among several chief towns was Nikwasi. The Overhill towns were located across the higher mountains in present eastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia. Principal towns included Chota and Great Tellico. It should be noted that these terms were created and used by Europeans to describe their changing geopolitical relationship with the Cherokee.[2]
One of the earliest European-American accounts of the Cherokee comes from the expedition of James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, sent in 1673 by fur-trader Abraham Wood of Virginia to the Overhill Cherokee country. Wood hoped to forge a direct trading connection with the Cherokee in order to bypass the Occaneechi Indians who were serving as middlemen on the Trading Path. The two Virginians did make contact with the Cherokee, although Needham was killed on the return journey and Arthur was almost killed. By the late 1600s traders from both Virginia and South Carolina were making regular journeys to Cherokee lands, but few wrote about their experiences. Much of the early trading contact period has only been pieced together by colonial laws and lawsuits involving traders. The trade was mainly deerskins, raw material for the booming European leather industry, in exchange for European technology "trade goods" such as iron and steel tools (kettles, knives, etc), firearms, gunpowder, and ammunition. Although selling alcohol to Indians was made illegal by colonial governments at an early date, rum and, later, whiskey, were a common item of trade.[4]
Cherokees portrayed in the 1730s
18th century
Of the southeastern Indian confederacies of the late 1600s and early 1700s (Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, etc), the Cherokee were one of the most populous and powerful, and were relatively isolated due to their hilly and mountainous homeland. A relatively small-scale trading system was established with Virginia in the late 1600s. A much stronger and important trade relationship with the colony of South Carolina, based in Charles Town, began in the 1690s and overshadowed the Virginia relationship by the early 1700s.[5]
Although there was some trading contact, the Cherokee remained relatively unaffected by the presence of European colonies in America until the Tuscarora War and its aftermath. In 1711 the Tuscarora began attacking colonists in North Carolina after diplomatic attempts to address various grievances failed. The governor of North Carolina asked South Carolina for military aid. Before the war was over, several years later, South Carolina had mustered and sent two armies against the Tuscarora. The ranks of both armies were made up mostly of Indians, with Yamasee troops especially. The first army, under the command of John Barnwell, campaigned in North Carolina in 1712. By the end of the year a fragile peace had been established and the army dispersed. No Cherokee were involved in the first army. Hostilities between the Tuscarora and North Carolina broke out soon after, and in late 1712 to early 1713 a second army from South Carolina fought the Tuscarora. This army consisted of about 100 British and over 700 Indian soldiers. As with the first army, the second depended heavily on the Yamasee and Catawba. This time, however, hundreds of Cherokee joined the army. The army's campaign ended after a major Tuscarora defeat at Hancock's Fort. All told, over 1,000 Tuscarora and allied Indians were killed or captured. Those captured were mainly sold into the Indian slave trade. Although the second army from South Carolina disbanded soon after the battle, the Tuscarora War continued for several years. Some previous neutral Tuscarora turned hostile, and the Iroquois confederacy entered the dispute. In the end a large number of Tuscarora moved north to live among the Iroquois.
The Tuscarora War altered the geopolitical context of colonial America in several ways, including a general Iroquois interest in the south. For the many southeastern Indians involved, it was the first time so many had collaborated in a military campaign and seen how different the various English colonies were. As a result the war helped to bind the Indians of the entire region together, enhancing Indian networks of communication and trade. The Cherokee become much more closely integrated with the region's various Indians and Europeans. The Tuscarora War marked the beginning of an English-Cherokee relationship that, despite breaking down on occasion, remained strong for much of the 18th century. The Tuscarora War also marks the rise of Cherokee military power, demonstrated in the 1714 attack and destruction of the Yuchi town of Chestowee (in today's southeastern Tennessee). The English traders Alexander Long and Eleazer Wiggan instigated the attack through various deceptions and promises, although there was a pre-existing conflict between the Cherokee and Yuchi. The traders' plot was based in the Cherokee town of Euphase (Great Hiwassee), and mainly involved Cherokee from that town. In May of 1714 the Cherokee destroyed the Yuchi town of Chestowee. Inhabitants not killed or captured fled to the Creek or the Savannah River Yuchi. Long and Wiggan had told the Cherokee that the South Carolina government wished for and approved this attack, which was not true. The governor of South Carolina, having heard of the plot, sent a messenger to tell the Cherokee not to attack Chestowee. The messenger arrived too late to save Chestowee, but played a role in the Cherokee decision not to continue and attack the Savannah River Yuchi. The Cherokee attack on the Yuchi ended with Chestowee, but it was enough to catch the attention of every Indian tribe and European colony in the region. Thus around 1715, after the Tuscarora War and the attack on Chestowee, the Cherokee emerged as a major power.[5]
In 1715, just as the Tuscarora War was winding down, the Yamasee War broke out. Numerous Indian tribes launched attacks on South Carolina. The Cherokee participated in some of the attacks, but were divided on what course to take. After South Carolina's militia suceeded in driving off the Yamasee and Catawba the Cherokee's position became strategically pivotal. Both South Carolina and the Lower Creek tried to gain Cherokee support. Some Cherokee favored an alliance with South Carolina and war on the Creek, while others favored the opposite. The impasse was resolved in January of 1716, when a delegation of Creek leaders were murdered at the Cherokee town of Tugaloo. Subsequently, the Cherokee launched attacks against the Creek, but in 1717 peace treaties between South Carolina and the Creek were finalized, undermining the Cherokee's commitment to war. Hostility and sporadic raids between the Cherokee and Creek continued for decades.[6]
The Cherokee nation was unified from a society of interrelated city-states in the early 18th century under the "Emperor" Moytoy, with the aid of an unofficial English envoy, Sir Alexander Cuming. In 1730, at Nikwasi, Chief Moytoy II of Tellico was chosen as "Emperor" by the Elector Chiefs of the principal Cherokee towns. Moytoy agreed to recognize the British king, George II, as the Cherokee protector. Seven prominent Cherokee, including Attacullaculla, traveled with Sir Alexander Cuming back to England. The Cherokee delegation stayed in London for four months. The visit culminated in a formal treaty of alliance between the British and Cherokee, the 1730 Treaty of Whitehall. While the journey to London and the treaty were important factors in future British-Cherokee relations, the title of Cherokee Emperor did not carry much clout among the Cherokee, and eventually passed out of Moytoy's direct avuncular lineage. The unification of the Cherokee nation was essentially ceremonial, with political authority remaining town-based for decades afterward. In addition, Sir Alexander Cuming's aspirations to play an important role in Cherokee affairs failed.[7]
Beginning at about the time of the American Revolutionary War in the late 18th century, divisions over continued accommodation of encroachments by white settlers, despite repeated violations of previous treaties, caused some Cherokee to begin to leave the Cherokee Nation. Many of these dissidents became known as the Chickamauga. Led by Chief Dragging Canoe, the Chickamauga made alliances with the Shawnee and engaged in raids against colonial settlements (see Chickamauga Wars). Some of these early dissidents eventually moved across the Mississippi River to areas that would later become the states of Arkansas and Missouri. Their settlements were established on the St. Francis and the White Rivers by 1800.
Pre 19th century society
Much of what we know about pre 19th century Cherokee history, culture, and society comes from the papers of American writer John Howard Payne. The Payne papers describe the memory Cherokee elder's had of a traditional societal structure based in a "white" organization of elders representing the seven clans, an organization which was hereditary and described as priestly. This group was responsible for religious activities such as healing, purification, and prayer. A second group of younger men were the "red" organization, which was responsible for warfare. However, warfare was considered a polluting activity which required the purification of the priestly class before participants could reintegrate in normal village life. However, this hierarchy had faded by the Cherokee removal in 1838. The reasons have been widely discussed and may include a revolt by the Cherokee against the abuses of the priestly class, the massive smallpox epidemic of the late 1730s, and the inception of Christian ideas which transformed Cherokee religion by the end of the eighteenth century (Irwin 1992).
Ethnographer James Mooney studied the Cherokee in the late 1980s and traced the decline of the former hierarchy to the revolt (Mooney 1900, 392). By that time the hierarchy of Cherokee religious practitioners was more informal and based more on individual knowledge and ability than the previous hereditary system. Further complicating this was that the Eastern Cherokee which had not participated in the removal and remained in the mountains of western North Carolina faced constant pressure from the U.S. government, who wished for their removal (Irwin 1992).
Another major source of early cultural history comes from the materials written in Cherokee by the didanvwisgi, or Cherokee medicine men, after the creation of the Cherokee syllabary by Sequoya in the 1820s. These were initially only used by the didanvwisgi, and were considered extremely powerful (Irwin 1992). Later, these were widely adopted by the Cherokee people.
19th century
Eventually, there were such large numbers of Cherokees in these areas, the U.S. Government in 1815 right after the War of 1812 in which Cherokees fought on both the British and American armies, established a Cherokee Reservation in Arkansas, with boundaries from north of the Arkansas River up to the southern bank of the White River. Cherokee leaders who lived in Arkansas were The Bowl, Sequoyah, Spring Frog and The Dutch. Another band of Cherokee lived in southeast Missouri, western Kentucky and Tennessee in frontier settlements and in European majority communities around the Mississippi River.
John Ross was an important figure in the history of the Cherokee tribe. His father emigrated from Scotland prior to the Revolutionary War. His mother was a quarter-blood Cherokee woman whose father was also from Scotland. He began his public career in 1809. The Cherokee Nation was founded in 1820, with elected public officials. John Ross became the chief of the tribe in 1828, and remained the chief until his death in 1866.
Trail of Tears
Cherokees were displaced from their ancestral lands in North Georgia and the Carolinas in a period of rapidly expanding white population, a situation as well as a gold rush around Dahlonega, Georgia in the 1830s. Various official reasons for the removal were given. One was that the Cherokee were not efficiently using their land, and the land should be given to white farmers. Others disputed this, although some contest to this day that President Jackson's intentions toward the Cherokee in this policy was humanitarian. Jackson himself said that the policy was an effort to prevent the Cherokee from facing the fate of "the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware" (Wishart 1995, 120). However there is ample evidence that the Cherokee were adapting modern farming techniques, and a modern analysis shows that the area was in general in a state of economic surplus (Wishart 1995).
Despite a Supreme Court ruling in their favor, many in the Cherokee Nation were forcibly relocated West, a migration known as the Trail of Tears or in Cherokee nvnadaulatsvyi (Cherokee:ᏅᎾᏓᎤᎳᏨᏱ). This took place after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, although as of 1883, the Cherokee were the last large southern Indian tribe to be removed. Even so, the harsh treatment the Cherokee received at the hands of white settlers caused some to enroll to emigrate west (Perdue 2000, 565).
Samuel Carter, author of Cherokee Sunset, writes: "Then� there came the reign of terror. From the jagged-walled stockades the troops fanned out across the Nation, invading every hamlet, every cabin, rooting out the inhabitants at bayonet point. The Cherokees hardly had time to realize what was happening as they were prodded like so many sheep toward the concentration camps, threatened with knives and pistols, beaten with rifle butts if they resisted."[8]
Ridge opposition
Among the Cherokee, John Ross led the battle to halt their removal. Ross's position was in opposition to that of a group known as the "Ridge Party" or the "Treaty Party". This was in reference to the Treaty of New Echota, which exchanged Cherokee land for land in the west and its principle signers John Ridge and his father Major Ridge.
On June 22, 1839, the prominent signers of the Treaty of New Echota were executed, including Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot by Cherokee extremists.
In the early 1860s, John Ridge's son, novelist John Rollin Ridge, led a group of delegates to Washington D.C. as early as the 1860s in a failed attempt to gain federal recognition for a Cherokee faction that was opposed to the leadership of Chief John Ross (Christiensen 1992).
Separation
In 1848, a group of Cherokee set out on an expedition to California, looking for new settlement lands. The expedition followed the Arkansas River upstream to Rocky Mountains in present-day Colorado, then followed the base of mountains northward into present-day Wyoming, before turning westward. The route become known as the Cherokee Trail or the Rocky Mountain Trail, starting from Fort Smith, Arkansas that also extended northward to Montana all the way to the Canadian border near Cut Bank, Montana.
The group, which undertook gold prospecting in California, returned along the same route the following year, noticing placer gold deposits in tributaries of the South Platte. The discovery went unnoticed for a decade, but eventually became one of the primary sources of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush of 1859 and other gold rushes across the western U.S. in the 1860s.
Not all of the eastern Cherokees were removed on the Trail of Tears. William Holland Thomas, a white store owner and state legislator from Jackson County, North Carolina, helped over 600 Cherokee from Qualla Town (the site of modern-day Cherokee, North Carolina) obtain North Carolina citizenship. As citizens, they were exempt from forced removal to the west. In addition, over 400 other Cherokee hid from Federal troops in the remote Snowbird Mountains of neighboring Graham County, North Carolina, under the leadership of Tsali (ᏣᎵ)[9] (the subject of the outdoor drama Unto These Hills held in Cherokee, North Carolina). Together, these groups were the basis for what is now known as the Eastern Band of Cherokees. Out of gratitude to Thomas, these Western North Carolina Cherokees served in the American Civil War as part of Thomas's Legion. Thomas's Legion consisted of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. The legion mustered approximately 2,000 men of both Cherokee and white origin, fighting primarily in Virginia, where their battle record was outstanding.[10] Thomas's Legion was the last Confederate unit in the eastern theater of the war to surrender after capturing Waynesville, North Carolina on May 9, 1865. They agreed to cease hostilities on the condition of being allowed to retain their arms for hunting. This, together with Stand Watie's surrender of western forces on July 23, 1865, gave the Cherokees the distinction of being the very last Confederates to capitulate in both theaters of the Civil War. In Oklahoma, the Dawes Act of 1887 broke up the tribal land base. Under the Curtis Act of 1898, Cherokee courts and governmental systems were abolished by the U.S. Federal Government.
Notes
1. The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2000. Census 2000 Brief (2002-02-01). Retrieved on 2007-03-10.
2. a b c Mooney, James [1900] (1995). Myths of the Cherokee. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-28907-9.
3. Glottochronology from: Lounsbury, Floyd (1961), and Mithun, Marianne (1981), cited in The Native Languages of the Southeastern United States, by Nicholas A. Hopkins.
4. Drake, Richard B. (2001). A History of Appalachia. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2169-8.
5. a b Gallay, Alan (2002). The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670-1717. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10193-7.
6. Oatis, Steven J. (2004). A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-3575-5.
7. Finger, John R. (2001). Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-33985-5.
8. Carter (III), Samuel (1976). Cherokee sunset: A nation betrayed : a narrative of travail and triumph, persecution and exile. New York: Doubleday, p. 232. ISBN 0-385-06735-6.
9. Tsali. History and culture of the Cherokee (North Carolina Indians). Retrieved on 2007-03-10.
10. Will Thomas. History and culture of the Cherokee (North Carolina Indians). Retrieved on 2007-03-10.
