The Eastern Band Who Stayed

In the autumn of eighteen thirty-eight, United States Army detachments moved through the river valleys and mountain hollows of what is now western North Carolina, rounding up Cherokee families at bayonet point. The operation had a name: the General Removal. What followed became known as the Trail of Tears, a forced march of approximately sixteen thousand Cherokee people west toward Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. An estimated four thousand died on the journey from cold, disease, dysentery, and hunger.

But the army did not catch everyone.

Perhaps one thousand Cherokee remained in the high hollows of the Smoky Mountains, hiding in ravines above the frost line, moving camp when patrols came close. They were the Eastern Band, and the name is important: not refugees, not remnants, but a people who refused to leave the only land they had known for at least fifteen thousand years.

The man who made their legal survival possible was William Holland Thomas, a white trader who had been informally adopted by Chief Yonaguska as a young man. Thomas spent his own money, over the course of the eighteen-forties, to purchase land in trust for the remaining Cherokee, because federal law at the time did not allow Cherokee people to hold title in North Carolina as individuals. He argued their case in state court and in Congress. He used a treaty provision granting North Carolina citizenship to certain Cherokee to establish their right to remain.

The land Thomas purchased became the Qualla Boundary: today roughly fifty-six thousand acres in the shadow of the Smokies, one of the few federally recognized tribal territories east of the Mississippi. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians currently numbers approximately sixteen thousand enrolled members. They are not a museum exhibit. They are a sovereign nation, with their own government, their own court system, their own language preservation programs, and the Museum of the Cherokee People in Cherokee, North Carolina, which holds the largest collection of Cherokee material culture in the United States.

The western Cherokee in Oklahoma and the Eastern Band share ancestry but separated at a moment of violence. The Eastern Band's legal standing rests on the specific details of William Holland Thomas's nineteen-year legal campaign, on a citizenship clause in a state treaty, and on the stubborn refusal of the people themselves to board the wagons.

The Qualla Boundary begins immediately south of the park's Oconaluftee Visitor Center. You are crossing into sovereign Cherokee land.