The Cherokee Homeland and the Trail Where They Wept

Long before the first European ship entered Carolina waters, the mountains and river valleys of the western part of the state belonged to the Aniyunwiya, the Principal People, known to their neighbors and to history as the Cherokee. Their towns dotted the rivers from the Hiwassee to the French Broad. They had a written language, a constitution, a newspaper.

By the eighteen twenties they were, by any measure the United States applied to itself, a functioning sovereign nation. It did not protect them. In eighteen thirty Congress passed the Indian Removal Act.

In eighteen thirty-five a small, unauthorized faction signed the Treaty of New Echota, ceding all Cherokee territory in the Southeast. The vast majority of the Nation rejected the treaty as fraudulent. It did not matter.

In May of eighteen thirty-eight, United States soldiers began rounding up Cherokee families at bayonet point, confining them in rough stockades while neighbors helped themselves to livestock, tools, and crops. Approximately sixteen thousand Cherokee were force-marched west to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. More than four thousand died of disease, starvation, and exposure along the way.

The Cherokee call the journey Nunna daul Tsuny, the Trail Where They Cried. Not everyone went. Hundreds of North Carolina Cherokee fled into the remote hollows of the Smokies.

A man named Tsali became a symbol of that resistance; he was captured and executed in the autumn of eighteen thirty-eight. But the soldiers withdrew, and those who remained, several hundred families sheltering in the high country, who formed the nucleus of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. A white trader and lawyer named William Holland Thomas acquired the lands that became the Qualla Boundary, the reservation in Jackson and Swain counties that the Eastern Band calls home today.

Roughly fifteen thousand citizens of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians remain here. The word Cherokee comes from an outsider's rendering. Their own name, Aniyunwiya, means simply the Real People.

They never left.