Cherokee Homeland and the Trail of Tears

Long before iron forges or theme parks, these mountains were the heart of the Cherokee homeland. The Cherokee hunted these ridges, traveled the Indian Gap Trail across the crest, and gave the Smokies many of their oldest names. That world was shattered by federal policy.

The Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty set the stage, and in the winter of eighteen thirty-eight into eighteen thirty-nine, the United States Army forced roughly sixteen thousand Cherokee from their southern Appalachian homeland and drove them west to what is now Oklahoma. Thousands died along the way of cold, hunger, and disease, on the route remembered as the Trail of Tears. The exact death toll is disputed by historians, but the figure most often cited is around four thousand.

Not everyone was removed. Several hundred Cherokee, aided by a settler named William Holland Thomas, managed to remain in the mountains of western North Carolina, becoming the ancestors of today's Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians on the Qualla Boundary, just over the ridge from here. Bound up in that story is Tsali, a Cherokee man whose resistance and execution became, in legend, part of the price that let the remnant band stay.

And the county you are standing in carries the name of John Sevier, an Overmountain militia leader who fought the Cherokee and became Tennessee's first governor. The map here still records both the people who were removed and the man who helped remove them.