The Cherokee, the Oconaluftee, and the Trail of Tears

Long before any cabin rose in White Oak Flats, these mountains were the heart of the Cherokee homeland. The Cherokee called the high blue ridges around you home for centuries, hunting the valleys and living in towns along the rivers. That world was shattered in eighteen thirty-eight.

After gold was discovered in north Georgia and pressure mounted for Cherokee land, the United States Army forced roughly seventeen thousand Cherokee from their homes and drove them west toward what is now Oklahoma. Thousands died of cold, hunger, and disease along the way, a brutal exile the Cherokee remember as the Trail of Tears. But not every Cherokee was taken.

In the rugged country along the Oconaluftee River, on the North Carolina side of these mountains, several hundred people held on. Some lived on land held by William Holland Thomas, a white trader who had been adopted by the Cherokee as a boy and who used earlier treaty provisions to shield them. Others simply hid in the highest, most inaccessible coves and refused to leave.

Those survivors, perhaps a thousand in all, became the ancestors of today's Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who still live in these mountains they never abandoned. When you drive the crest of the Smokies, you are crossing ground that was Cherokee long before it was a park, and for one people it never stopped being home.