Creek and Cherokee Removal: The Land Under Atlanta

Before Atlanta existed, the land where the city stands was Creek Confederacy territory. The Creek Nation, or Muscogee, had lived in the watersheds of central Georgia for centuries, farming, trading, and governing themselves through a confederated system of towns. The city of Decatur, immediately east of Atlanta, was built on a Creek town site. The area around the Chattahoochee River was Creek country, and the land itself remembered that long after the people were gone.

The northern Georgia mountains and their eastern slopes were Cherokee territory. The Cherokee Nation had built a remarkable institutional response to American expansion in the early nineteenth century, developing a written language through the syllabary created by Sequoyah, founding a bilingual newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix, establishing a constitutional government modeled in part on the United States' own. Chief John Ross, who had a Scottish father and a Cherokee mother and was by blood only about one-eighth Cherokee, led the Nation and spent years fighting removal through American courts, winning cases and watching the decisions go unenforced.

The Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty authorized the president to negotiate removal treaties. The Trail of Tears in eighteen thirty-eight forced the removal of the Cherokee at gunpoint. Federal soldiers rounded up Cherokee families, held them in stockades through a deadly summer, and marched approximately fourteen thousand people westward to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The death toll on the trail is estimated at between four thousand and eight thousand people. The Creek removal had preceded the Cherokee, conducted in stages through the eighteen thirties, with similar mortality.

Neither nation negotiated away their territory willingly. The treaties that formalized the removals were signed by minority factions without authority from the tribal governments and were enforced by the United States Army regardless.