Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (33 page)

The fugitives included a man known as Tsali, or Charlie. He was so determined to stay at home in the North Carolina mountains that he petitioned to take advantage of a treaty provision allowing him to become a U.S. citizen, as some other North Carolina Cherokees had done. Tsali was bitterly disappointed that soldiers rounded up his family anyway. He slipped away, only to be captured again. Conflicting stories describe his motives for what he did next, but according to an account by his wife, Tsali declared
“he had been treated so bad by the whites [that] life had lost all its endearments.” Tsali and his male relatives killed two soldiers and escaped. John Ross could do nothing except try to avoid collective punishment; when informed by Major Robert Anderson of the killings, Ross emphasized that it was “
one of those unfortunate individual occurrences” for which only the perpetrators, not the whole Cherokee Nation, should be punished. It may have been to avoid such punishment that North Carolina Cherokees assisted in hunting down Tsali and his relatives. For some, this collaboration created an opportunity. The soldiers had never been eager to chase Indians through the rough landscape of the Smokies. The nearest army commander promised that the roundup of Cherokees would end once Tsali was captured, and so it was that
Cherokees themselves put Tsali on trial for the murders, chained him to a tree, and had him shot by a three-man firing squad. He was sacrificed. Many Cherokees were permitted to stay in North Carolina. They slowly came out of hiding and established towns and farms, often living on land that was held for their use by white
relations or by a sympathetic white trader, William H. Thomas, who in time was adopted by the Cherokee band and even named their chief.

Eventually the eastern Cherokees received a formal reservation, which I visited in 2014. A portion of the land was in Cherokee County, North Carolina. The federal Indian agency had offices in the town of Cherokee, on Tsali Boulevard. Homes on reservation land spread out in valleys outside town. Far from hiding in the mountains, local merchants advertised their shops as “Indian owned.” The main street was lined with stores selling moccasins and tom-toms. A statue of a bare-chested Indian at least twenty feet high announced the Indian Ink Tattoo Studio. Cherokee was a tourist town, accessible from the resort communities of Asheville, North Carolina, and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The biggest draw for tourists was an enormous Harrah’s casino. On a gaming floor the scale of a basketball arena, patrons worked rows of slot machines, while others drank at a bar that had electronic poker machines built into the surface. It was possible without leaving the grounds to dine in an upscale Italian restaurant, join a high-stakes poker game, or spend the night in a high-rise hotel. The labor demands of the casino and hotel were likely responsible for some of Cherokee’s diversity: the Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in town advertised a mass in Spanish. Next to the church, an Indian-owned restaurant advertised Indian tacos—flat circles of fry bread piled high with hamburger, beans, lettuce, and tomatoes.

To become an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, it was necessary to demonstrate ancestry from an official roll taken in 1924. The Eastern Band claimed fifteen thousand members—which is to say its population had recovered to nearly the size it was before the bulk of the eastern Cherokees were removed in 1838. According to the 2010 census, fewer than ten thousand actually lived on reservation land near Cherokee, but they were part of a substantial Indian population scattered throughout the South—
several hundred thousand people, on and off reservations. The eastern Cherokees are regulated under the authority of Congress, which recognizes their sovereign right
to choose their leaders, use land, run schools, and issue casino licenses. They are not required to pay state taxes. They are also U.S. citizens, a status that was gradually conferred on Indians through a series of laws over several generations. By participating in tribal life while also participating fully in the wider civic life of the United States, the eastern Cherokees live by roughly the same principles that John Ross proposed more than once in the 1820s and 1830s. He was more than a century ahead of his time.

On the first day of summer, on the advice of a friend, I drove westward out of Cherokee, past the Arrowhead Motel and a billboard promoting a local woman who was a contestant for Miss Indian World. The roads led deeper into the mountains, so near the westernmost point of North Carolina that the stations on the car radio were out of Tennessee. Reaching Robbinsville, I parked the car and joined a group of people taking a commemorative walk along a bit of the Trail of Tears. It was a seven-mile hike down a steep and winding U.S. Forest Service road. Local people said the dirt and gravel road ran roughly parallel to an old trail into Tennessee, which the army used in 1838 to haul Cherokee detainees over the mountain. About twenty participants in this annual event were walking in the opposite direction that the emigrants traveled—instead of going over the mountain and away, they walked back down the mountain and returned to town. Their destination was the Junaluska Museum, named for a Cherokee who fought in Andrew Jackson’s army at Horseshoe Bend. Removed in 1838, Junaluska escaped from Oklahoma, returned to his home mountains, and is buried by the museum in Robbinsville.

Participants welcomed me to join them. It was a perfect morning, cool in the shade of the woods. For a time I walked alongside Sheree Peters, who described her ancestry as both Cherokee and Irish. She speculated that an Irish-Cherokee marriage may have made it possible for her Cherokee ancestors to remain in North Carolina after 1838. Also in our knot of walkers was Adam Wachacha, a member of the governing council of the Eastern Band. Wachacha said he had recently completed
thirteen years in the U.S. Army. He was posted for a time at South Carolina’s Fort Jackson, the name of which he found irksome. At Fort Hood, Texas, he was attached to a unit whose regimental history included fighting Indian wars. He sometimes commented on the irony when talking with other natives in the unit. Serving in an army that flew Black Hawk and Apache helicopters, Wachacha was deployed to South Korea, where he was stationed at Camp Red Cloud. He found the army’s profuse use of Indian names to be less offensive than the name of Fort Jackson, and wasn’t enthused about the general movement to have Indian names effaced. “A little too much political correctness,” he said.

It was common to encounter veterans among the eastern Cherokees. At the Museum of the Cherokee Indian I sat with another man, Jerry Wolf, whose weathered face appeared on posters for the museum. He could often be found working at the museum’s front desk, though he was nearly ninety years old when I met him. Wolf told me that he was in the navy on D-day in 1944. He vividly remembered serving as part of a crew that brought a landing craft full of army Rangers to the beaches at Normandy. He also recalled something of his family history. Born in 1924, he said he had grown up knowing stories about his family in the Civil War, but not about the period of Indian removal. He said his parents did not like to talk about that era—they were “edgy” about it, fearing that the government “could still come and gather us up.” Wolf did not know how his family persisted after 1838, only that they had.

One Cherokee I met knew a portion of his family’s removal story. He was Freeman Owle, a local public speaker who had often told it. The heart of his story was that his family was sent westward, but that one woman and her child broke away and returned; that child was Freeman Owle’s ancestor. There was no way to prove this family lore except that Freeman Owle was here by the eastern Cherokee reservation, sitting with me on a rock near the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Freeman Owle told his story without bitterness. “Andrew Jackson is
dead,” he said. “Junaluska is dead.” He said he would rather “accept today as today,” and that, while it was vital to remember those who died on the Trail of Tears, it was also necessary to focus on those who survived.

“We don’t expect our land back,” he added. “We are an invisible minority. That’s what we are. But we don’t expect anything other than the truth to be told.”

I asked if Indian removal was, for him, less a story of removal than a story of persistence.

He answered that it was. “We are,” he said, “still here.”

Outside Florence, Alabama, stand the ruins of Forks of Cypress— a plantation house on former Cherokee land obtained by Andrew Jackson. It was built after 1818 by one of the general’s close friends. It is a supreme example of the layered history visible in the territory we call Jacksonland.

Andrew Jackson posed for this portrait in 1819, after his victories at Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans, as well as his capture of vast Indian lands through a series of treaty negotiations. The painting by Rembrandt Peale is notable for its realism, showing Jackson’s lined face, slightly pained expression, and emaciated body.

John Ross was one of many Indian leaders whose portraits were painted when visiting Washington for treaty negotiations and other business. Commissioned and collected by a federal Indian official, the paintings reflect the outward transformation of native elites—a transformation encouraged by the federal government, though not purely for altruistic reasons.

Ross lived for many years in a two-story log home in what is still called Rossville, near the Georgia-Tennessee line.

Jackson lived in a two-story log cabin until 1819, when he was earning substantial profits from cotton grown on land he had obtained from the Cherokees. He began upgrading his living quarters at the Hermitage outside Nashville.