[For much of the matter contained in this paper I am indebted to the Bureau of American Ethnology and to Mr. Charles C. Royce and Professor Cyrus Thomas, its learned and efficient workers. These sources of information may be profitably consulted by any person interested in the aboriginal literature of our country.—V. O. K.]
The Cherokees, more properly the Tsullakees, have occupied a more prominent place in the affairs and history of the United States than any other tribe, with the possible exception of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, of New York. They bear some resemblance to each other, and though an open question, the Cherokee dialect is held by the American Bureau of Ethnology to belong to the Iroquoisan family of languages. This opinion leaves the inference that in the remote past there was tribal union between them.
Less than half a century after Columbus touched these shores, De Soto and his followers began their march to explore the lands that lay beyond. They penetrated the country as far as what is now the northern limits of Georgia, and the northeastern corner of Alabama, when they came in contact with a tribe of natives, reported in their memoirs as Chelaques, but which have since been abundantly identified with the Cherokee Indians. They occupied as homes and hunting-grounds nearly the whole territory south of the Ohio river and east of the Mississippi—the areas excepted being the present States of Mississippi and Florida, and the southern extremities of Alabama and Georgia.
Among the most interesting of the relics that reveal somewhat of the inner life of these autochthones at this early period, are their sacred formulas, transmitted to them from a remote past, through traditions confided to their shamans, or priestly fathers. For a knowledge of these formulas, the world is indebted to the genius of an unlettered Cherokee. Sequoyah, in 1821, with a marvelous gift of invention, and unaided by artificial learning, constructed a syllabary, by means of which the speech and thought of his people were, for the first time, brought in obedience to written characters. No other tribe in North America had then an alphabet of its own. The Crees and Micmacs, in Canada, and the Tukuth Indians, in Alaska, had ideographic systems, invented by missionaries, and the Mayas, in Central America, wrote in hieroglyphics, but neither of them possessed a literary contrivance by which words and sentences could be constructed, after the method of a true orthography. The admirable genius of Sequoyah gave to his people this contrivance, by which their sacred formulas were rescued from infirm or unfaithful memories, and have become part of the written literature of the native races. Many of the Formulas, thus escaped from the crypt of ages, have been secured by the United States Bureau of Ethnology, and possess for the lover of aboriginal research the peculiar interest that in them is embalmed the faith and the philosophy of one of the most striking of the primitive peoples of the continent. These Formulas are terse, turgid, and cabalistic phrases addressed to their divinities, and which, though chiefly in the form of supplication, are sometimes songs of praise and eulogy, and sometimes charms to compel the favors of languid or reluctant spirits. In this latter form, they are multiplied to meet every danger and every exigency of life; and in war, in pestilence, in famine, in floods, in droughts, they are trusted with reverent, unfaltering faith. The lover, the hunter, the warrior, each, through his shaman, appeals to the potential energy of the Formula for the successful issue of his enterprise. Even after the missionaries of the white men had introduced their religion among these simple worshipers, and they had surrendered most of their creed, they still held tenaciously to the Formulas, as if, in some manner, interwoven with the destiny allotted them. The shaman, after his profession of the Christian faith, combined his mystic phrases with texts of Scripture in the same religious service, and it was not uncommon to see him publicly officiating as Indian conjurer and Methodist preacher.
The Formulas, in their structure and purpose, very closely resemble the phylacteries of the Hebrews, which consists of extracts from their sacred book written on strips of parchment and, according to the Targum, worn about the person as amulets to drive away evil spirits. That these phylacteries should reappear in oral form among an unlettered people, between whom and Israel there are other points of resemblance, may, not unreasonably, be taken as an added argument in support of the theory that part of the Jewish captives wandered from Assyria into the New World, where they were absorbed and lost in the broad and friendly bosom of their indigenous host.
The Sacred Formulas possess an ethnologic value second to no other known means of discovering tribal cult and character, and they afford measureless aid to the study of native folklore before it was influenced by the white man's presence. The Medical Formulas are concerned only with the health of the people, and they are based upon the following allegory: All the animals of the earth met in council to devise means for the destruction of man, their common enemy. Each species possessed the power over some particular deadly pestilence; these distempers they combined and turned loose upon the devoted race. The suffering and mortality that followed were so appalling as to excite the pity of the vegetable world, which, in its turn, called a council. Each species in this Kingdom was gifted with the balm that brought healing to some one of the many ills that afflict mankind, and, in the supreme moment of his despair, they distilled their life-giving balsams for the deliverance of man. The Shamans, who lived in close communion with floral nature, were intrusted with her secrets; these secrets they embodied in formulas which they delivered to the people that they might hear the glad message; and thus they were saved. To the credit of this tradition, it may be affirmed that their Shamans were really instructed in the medicinal qualities of many indigenous plants. Other plants in their Materia Medica were wholly inert; these they employed as fetiches from some fancied resemblance to diseased organs, for the principle of “similia similibus” was as familiar to their ancestors as to the modern school of Doctor Hahnemann. Failing memory was treated with beggarlice and other burr-bearing plants, that the sticking qualities of the burrs might be imparted to the memory. Goat's Rue was prescribed for falling out of the hair because the roots of this plant are tough and difficult to pull up. The Maidenhair Fern was administered for rheumatism that the contracted muscles might unbend as the fronds of the fern unroll during its healthy growth. But the Medical Formulas were not restricted to drugs as curative agents. The bath, especially in a running stream, was a most trusted resource in the Cherokee therapeutics, and it is curious to note that the patient was directed to plunge seven times in the healing flood, even as Elisha, three thousand years before, directed Naaman to wash in Jordan “seven times” for his leprosy. The numeral seven, it may be remarked, was as much a mystical number with the Cherokee as with the Israelite; this is shown in his law establishing the seven days' purification and in other ceremonial customs enjoined by his faith.
The Religous Formulas of the Cherokees reveal a system of belief and practice almost unique. They had no Great Spirit, yet their pantheon was crowded with gods; they looked forward to no happy hunting-ground as the reward of their courage and sacrifices, but their faith was immovable in the temporal rewards that were to crown their savage virtues. Long life, freedom from pain, success in war, in love, in the chase, were the gifts of the gods they worshiped, and their name was legion. They saw these gods clothed in the forms of birds and reptiles, of mountains and streams, they heard their voice in the storm and felt their presence in the frost, and they bowed down in homage to them all. When death came it was to them the end of all things; no fears disturbed their last moments and no sorrow wrung the heart of their children.
The Military Formulas of the Cherokees were designed to render their warriors invulnerable in battle, to which end they prescribed charmed roots and ceremonial washings. A writer for the American Bureau of Ethnology, referring to the practice here enjoined, mentions the fact that it was religiously observed by almost every man of the three hundred Cherokees who served in the war between the States, and he humorously adds, “It is but fair to state that not more than two or three of the entire number were wounded in actual battle.”
The devotional methods of the Cherokee disclosed by these Formulas and the traditions inspiring them reveal in him an essentially religious mind—the result of his close relation to creative power. Like the Jew, and in common with other Indians, he “believed himself to be the result of a special creation by a partial deity, and held that his was the one favored race,” but, unlike the Jew, he has not been able to impress his sacred character upon other races of men.
It was nearly a century after the expedition of De Soto before the Cherokees again met the white man. Then they encountered the pioneers from the Atlantic coast, and then the racial conflict began—a conflict that for two hundred and fifty years has been waged against the rapacity of Anglo-Saxon civilization. When first begun, the villages of the Cherokees covered the mountains and valleys of the Shenandoah, and their scouts camped on the summit of Monticello. Upon the Blue Ridge the Cherokee sat as upon a thone; within his dominion was cradled “the Tennessee and the Cumberland, the Kanawha, and the Kentucky, the Pedee and the Santee, the Savannah and the Altamaha, the Chatahoochee and the Alabama;” along their banks he pursued his game, and upon their laughing waters his love-song and his war-whoop were carried to the sea. These scenes of sovereign sway remained undisturbed for many years after the white man became the red man's neighbor. The distance between the mountains and the sea coast for a long time kept them apart. The cupidity of the white fur-trader, however, and the display of his coveted goods brought the two together within the dominions of the native monarchs. The Ahabs thus saw their neighbor's splendid vineyard and were stricken with a passion to possess it. The title to the coveted possession was thenceforth to be only a question of time.
From 1721 to 1783, the Cherokees made ten treaties, by which the Colonies of Virginia, Georgia, and the two Carolinas acquired seventy thousand square miles of land. From 1785 to 1866, they executed thirty-five treaties with the United States, by which they ceded fifty-six thousand square miles of territory lying south of the Ohio river. To the new country thus acquired, the Americans of the Atlantic States were early attracted. Among these immigrants was the widowed mother of Sam Houston, who, with her family, moved from Virginia to Tennessee, in 1807, and settled on the Tennessee river, the boundary line between the American and Cherokee possessions. Her son, the future hero of San Jacinto, was then fourteen years of age, and was not long in finding his way across the river to the red braves of whom he had heard, and for whom he had conceived a most romantic passion. Their unfettered habits, their wild liberty, their love of adventure, found in him a responsive chord. He was daily, and often for days, without intermission, among his new friends, and for four years the companionship continued. During this time he was adopted by the Chief Oolooteka, as his son. Two years afterwards, he fought in the Creek war, side by side with the Cherokees, as American allies.
Notwithstanding the vast areas acquired from the Cherokees, they were still in possession of extensive domains, and these gave rise to such frequent conflicts with white settlers, that the United States government resolved upon separating the hostile elements. As early as 1803, President Jefferson suggested the exchange with the Indians of their lands on the east of the Mississippi for equal areas on the west, lying within the Louisiana purchase. In 1809, a few Cherokees moved to Arkansas, and ten years later six thousand had emigrated; the majority, however, resented the most alluring offers, and clung with superstitious tenacity to their native hills and streams. Their obstinacy, and the commotion attending it, again brought Sam Houston in the drama of Cherokee life. He was appointed sub-agent to the refractory tribe, and successfully carried out the treaty recently concluded with it.
In 1822, a convention was made between the Cherokees and the Empire of Mexico, by which the Indians were permitted to occupy and cultivate certain lands in eastern Texas, in consideration of fealty and service in case of war. Neither the empire, however, nor its successor, the Republic of Mexico, would consent to part with their sovereignty in the soil, and persistently refused any other rights than those of domicile and tillage to the savage tenants. What is known in Texas history as the Fredonian War, was largely the result of this refusal. It was inaugurated under a solemn league entered into in December, 1826, between the white colonists and the disappointed tribes, and its purpose was to prosecute against Mexico a war of conquest, and divide the conquered territory. Owing to a combination of disasters, the expected recruits did not join the Fredonian standard, and its little army melted away under the apathy of friends and the overwhelming numbers of enemies.
In 1825, the Cherokees remaining east of the Mississippi numbered about thirteen thousand, and owned about the same number of slaves. They had adopted many of the habits and industries of the white man, and were rapidly adopting his laws and his civilization. Trusting to their interpretation of certain treaty guarantees, made by the United States, they formed themselves into a sovereign nation, within the limits of Georgia, which aroused the resentment of the State, and resulted in serious complications with the general government—only tranquilized by tedious negotiations and wise counsels.
In 1828, the government ceded to the Cherokees seven million acres of land in Arkansas Territory, in exchange for lands east of the Mississippi. The year following, they were visited in their new home by their friend and former guest, Sam Houston. In the ten years that had elapsed since his sub-agency among them in the east, he had achieved distinction at home, had married a young wife, and had become Governor of Tennessee. For reasons not historically known, he had abandoned his bride, abdicated his high office, became a voluntary exile from civilization, and was then in the wild home of his friends, seeking the hospitalities of refuge that he knew would not be denied him. He there found Oolooteka, his adopted father, who took him to his bosom, and soon made him a citizen of the Nation. He lived three years among this untutored but warm hearted people, and then was called back to civilization by the President's commission to negotiate a peace with the Comanche Indians. This took him to Texas, where distinction awaited him; also an opportunity to serve his constant friends.
After occupying the Arkansas tract for five years, the Cherokees, by a new treaty—that of 1833—exchanged it for seven million acres, lying in the present Indian Territory. The Cherokees east of the Mississippi were, meanwhile, agitating with endless conflicts the white people and their governments. They were haunted with the fear of forcible expulsion from their ancestral seats in the east, and of losing their tribal identity in the common mass of amalgamated savages in the west. There seems to be a sentiment universal in the human heart to cherish with reverence the ancestral stream down which has coursed its own life blood. “Even the meanest and most ignorant of the Tartars,” says Gibbon, “preserved with conscious pride the inestimable treasure of their genealogy.” Pride of ancestry had deep root in the Cherokee breast, and it cried aloud for resistance to acts that would, at a blow, rob them of both the name and the home of their fathers. They, therefore, in 1829, set up their claim to nationality, and to all the sovereign rights that belong to it. President Jackson answered this claim by recalling the fact that, during the Revolutionary war, they were the allies of Great Britain, and that, consequently, by the event of the war, their sovereignty, like hers, ceased over every part of the territory embraced within the limits of either of the thirteen Colonies. He also recalled the fact, that, while the government, under the treaty of 1783, received the vanquished Cherokees “into favor and protection,” it did not restore to them their lost sovereignty. A sullen discontent rankled in the bosom of these disappointed Indians for several years. At last, in 1835, a treaty was negotiated with them, by which they ceded to the United States all their remaining territory east of the Mississippi, consisting of about eight millions of acres; and stipulated to remove west two years after the ratification. The consideration therefor was five million dollars, and the new home designated was the western outlet lying beyond the Indian Territory. The removal of the Indians was opposed by John Ross, their Chief, and excited such general discussion that it forced itself into the politics of the day.
In this same year of 1835, the Western Cherokees sought recognition of their alleged claim under the Mexican convention of thirteen years before. The General Consultation, urged thereto by Sam Houston, who was a member of that body, also commander of the Texas army, affirmed their title to the lands they then occupied north and west of Nacogdoches and lying between the Neches and Angelina rivers. In February of the following year, Sam Houston, as chairman of a commission appointed by Governor Henry Smith concluded with these Indians a treaty of amity, alliance and cession. In 1837 the senate of the Republic of Texas rejected the treaty of the Provisional Government, and in 1838 President Lamar directed the attention of congress to this act of the senate, and to the further fact that Mexico had never, under any form of government, either conveyed or promised to convey as allodial property any portion of the Texas territory then, or at any time, occupied or claimed by the Cherokees. In July of the following year the Texan government summoned a conference with the Indians and proposed to reimburse their expenditures on condition of their peaceable return to the Indian Territory. Their wily chief, Bowles, prolonged the parley till he could bring up reinforcements. A two days' battle resulted. Rusk and Burleson, with five hundred Texans, drove a thousand braves out of the land, killing their leader and burning their villages. This appeal to arms decided the conflict of title in a manner that admitted of no appeal and brought permanent peace to the settlements. Six months later, Gen. Rusk drove a remaining fragment of these Indians from San Saba county, in which they had sought refuge. In the following year their powerful and steadfast friend, Sam Houston, then a member of the Texan congress, made a last and vigorous appeal in their behalf. It was unavailing, and the Cherokees thenceforward ceased to vex the people of Texas with either their presence or their supplications.
During these struggles of the Western Cherokees for expansion of territory, their Eastern brethren were contending with the United States for the possession of the lands they had surrendered under the treaty, and were ultimately transferred by threats or by military force to the West. A few of their number had betaken themselves to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, and thus escaped the general exodus of their tribe.
After all the Cherokees were finally settled on their extensive reservation in the West, it was found that they were torn by dissensions and divided into hostile parties. These parties were three in number: The “old settler” element that had voluntarily removed in 1819, the “Treaty” or “Ridge” element that migrated under the treaty of 1835, and the “Ross” element that was removed by military force. All efforts at reconciliation were futile; the chiefs grew more resentful under discussion; ferocity crept into every wigwam; and the assassination of prominent leaders became the rule of conduct expected of every patriot. These disorders could not be permitted by the government of the United States, and in 1844 the President appointed a commission to inquire into their cause and suggest a proper remedy. It met at Fort Gibson, but its inquiries yielded no practical results.
About this time, when the nation most needed the counsels of its wise men, it sustained an immeasurable loss in the death of the venerated and gifted half-breed, Sequoyah, also called from his Dutch father, George Guess, who, it will be remembered, was the unlettered inventor of the Cherokee alphabet. He has been called the Cadmus of his people; but greater was he than Cadmus. The Phoenician carried to Greece letters already invented, the Cherokee invented them himself. A true lover of his people, he had gone to Mexico to find and bring back the scattered bands of his discontented brethren and died in the midst of his search, and was buried far from the tomb of his fathers and unsung in the solemn dirge of his nation.
After this great national bereavement, the factions grew more violent, and so great became their rancor that within the short space of a few months the annals of this wretched people were stained with a record of thirty-three murders of the nation's distinguished men. The United States again interposed their authority to put an end to this state of anarchy and crime. Commissioners conferred with representatives of the three factions and negotiated with them a plan of pacification out of which grew the treaty of 1846. It provided for the extinction of all sectional policies and a general amnesty of all political offenses; it also reaffirmed and extended the cession of land already made, and provided for their reversion to the United States in case of the extinction of the Cherokees or their abandonment of the possession.
After an interval of comparative repose, the Cherokees were again aroused by serious disturbance. White settlers were trespassing upon their territory, and abolitionists from the North were corrupting their slaves. The United States, in 1860, sent troops to expel the invaders, but the Civil War put a stop to these military operations. The war itself was the signal for further intestine strife. The Indians were divided on the question of slavery, and were, therefore, divided in their allegiance between the two contending sections. The Ross party was in sympathy with the North; its opponents were friendly to the South. The two factions, however, met in convention and there healed their differences, and as a single nation formed an alliance with the Confederate States. They organized two regiments for the Southern army, and placed them in command of Col. Drew and Col. Stand Watie, adherents of the Ross and anti-Ross parties, respectively. Col. Drew's regiment of Ross men soon deserted the Confederate colors and enlisted in the United States service. Ross then renounced his affiliations with the South and threw himself into the arms of the Federal government, not, however, to incur any peril in its defense, but to hide under the shadow of its protection; for he at once took refuge in the safe city of Philadelphia, in which he closely abided till the close of the war. The Indian Territory, meantime, became the theatre of guerilla warfare, and its warring factions daily grew in the fervor of their mutual hatred.
At the close of the war the United States became anxious to define their authority and to readjust Indian reservations conformably with plans to promote western emigration of citizens from the States. In pursuance of this purpose, delegates from all the tribes were summoned to meet in council at Fort Smith, and although no definite treaty resulted from this meeting, it afforded the commissioners an opportunity to submit the demands of the United States government for the preservation of peace and public order. It also enabled them to denounce John Ross as a public disturber, and degrade him from his chieftaincy; and it further afforded them the personal conference necessary to give adequate instructions to the two Cherokee factions for the submission of their grievances to the general government. For the purposes of this last object, representatives of the Federal and Confederate elements of the Nation repaired early in 1866 to Washington, where for several months their cause was judicially considered, though the court failed to effect the reunion so ardently desired by the government. In consequence separate treaties were negotiated with the hostile sections. In June that with the Southern Cherokees was concluded, by which a certain portion of the reservation was set apart for their exclusive use and subject to their exclusive jurisdiction. In July that with the Northern Cherokees was made, and inasmuch as they were in the majority, and in undisputed possession of the machinery of government, the treaty with them was made binding on the whole Nation. It provided by its terms for the establishment of a Federal court and one or more military posts in the Nation, also a general inter-tribal council; it authorized, under certain conditions, the settlement of other tribes in the Nation; it ceded to the United States in trust its “neutral” land and its “Cherokee strip,” to be sold for the benefit of the Nation; it provided a right of way through the Nation from north to south and one from east to west for the construction of railroads; and it guaranteed the Cherokees in the peacable possession of their lands, in the enjoyment of their domestic institutions, and against the unauthorized intrusions of white men. Two years later a supplemental article to this treaty was confirmed, whereby was ratified the sale of the “neutral land” made by the United States. Four years after this the government began the sale, in limited parcels, of the “Cherokee strip.”
About the time of the proclamation of the treaty of '66, the Secretary of the Interior recommended to the commissioners to restore John Ross to the chieftaincy from which they had removed him. The old leader, however, had passed beyond the elemency of his judges; he lay stricken with a mortal sickness, and died within a few days at Washington, at the advanced age of seventy-six years. He was of Scotch-Indian parentage, and his character was strongly marked with the thrift of one side, the cunning of the other, and the persistency of both. Though only a half-breed, he was always the champion of the full-blooded Cherokees in any conflict between them and their brethren of mixed descent. His career, though not altogether an admirable one, was, throughout its course, singularly remarkable.
By virtue of a provision in the treaty of '66, a body of Delawares and a fragmentary band of Munsees, also about eight hundred Shawnees, were assigned homes in the Cherokee domain, and were merged into the great family tribe of the Cherokees. The Osages, the Kaws, the Pawnees, the Poncas, the Otoes, and the Missourias, also acquired homestead tracts in the Cherokee reservation, but they still preserved their tribal independence and identity. This infusion of a new strain into the national life of the Cherokees seemed to bring together the fragments of this broken people. A season of peace blessed their unhappy dwellings, and abundant harvests rewarded their reluctant toil. Two years of such contentment served to soften the asperities that had so long divided them, and to cover their past with a healing oblivion.
Under another provision of this treaty of '66, the Congress of the United States, by grants of lands and privileges, secured the construction of two important railroads through the Indian Territory. Both opened vast regions to civilization, and peopled them with a multitude of its pioneers. Many of these did not go beyond the Cherokee lands, and so great was their number, and so largely augmented by other alien residents and by the irruption of negro freedmen, that the Cherokees, realizing their feeble minority and the danger that threatened their power, enacted laws that limited the privileges of citizenship to their own unmixed people, and that provided for the removal of all others beyond their borders. These acts were resisted, not only by the sufferers under them, but by the United States government, whose authority was thereby superseded, in violation of treaty engagements. In consequence, an order was promulgated, forbidding the removal of aliens unless by judicial process after due trial and approval by the Department of the Interior. The harsh procedure proposed by the Nation's legislative council was thus averted, but for ten years the questions involved provoked angry and unending conferences between the Federal government and the Nation, and kept the threatened classes in perpetual fear of physical harm or of ultimate eviction from their homes.
The United States government sought to remedy these evils, which, it was thought, resulted from the system of holding the entire Indian domain in a single unbroken tribal tract. Provision was, therefore, made, under act of February 8, 1887, for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the different reservations. Four years later, part of the cause of the irritation was removed by the retrocession to the United States of the six million acre tract known as the “Cherokee Outlet” and the enrichment of the Cherokee treasury by a deposit of eight million dollars to its credit.
By act of March 3, 1893, Congress, among other measures of relief, made provision for the training school of the Cherokee settlement in North Carolina—the last remnant of the Nation east of the Mississippi. By the same act the system of land allotments already inaugurated was further strengthened and promoted. To this end the President was directed to appoint three commissioners to negotiate with the Five Civilized Tribes, of which the Cherokee Nation is one, for the surrender of tribal title to all lands in the Territory, either by cession to the United States, or by allotment in severalty among the Indians, or by other equitable means to be agreed on—this extinguishment of title to be the precursor of the creation of one or more States out of the lands so taken from the national domain. The agency created under this law is known as the Dawes Commission, so called from the name of its chairman. It has been perpetuated and its powers enlarged by subsequent acts, the last of which abolishes tribal courts in the Territory, substituting Federal courts in their stead, and gives to the President the veto power over all acts of tribal councils. Thus despoiled of a Nation's vital functions, but little remains to be done to complete the destruction of tribal autonomy; that little may be safely predicated of the policy that has thus far directed the counsels and the conduct of the government.
The Dawes Commission has reported its inability to effect the submission of the tribes, and it particularly mentions the Cherokees as inflexible in their opposition to any agreement that contemplates the final act of tribal disintegration. The chairman is of opinion that the only remedy for the “evils that afflict these people” lies in the division and allotment of their public domain among the individuals of the several tribes. The Secretary of the Interior, in his report, presents a gloomy array of vicious results growing out of the Indians' methods of administering the public business, and he concludes his searching arraignment by recommending the total extinction of tribal government in the Territory and the substitution of a system by which the Indians will become United States citizens and be governed by United States laws. The President, in his message to Congress, fully accepts the Secretary's conclusions, and adds that the conditions of Indian life have so changed that their system of government has become “practically impossible,” and that the evils resulting from the perversion of the great trusts confided to them can only be cured “by the resumption of control by the government which created them.”
It does not require any remarkable perspicacity to perceive that history is about to close its brief page of the Cherokees as a Nation. Their broad fields and the boundless desire of their neighbors to possess them is hastening this consummation. The most universal passion in the breast of man seems to be an immortal longing after the soil from which he sprung, whether continent, island, or vineyard. From the day he was expelled from the garden he has wanted a paramount estate—a paradise of his own. To that end all his aspirations have pointed, and, whether Israelite, Goth, or Anglo-Saxon, his mania has ever been the conquest and possession of the earth. He may be honest in all that concerns the money and the movables of another, he may be sinless of even the desire for the personalty of his neighbor, but, alas, the allodium of his brother puts too great a strain upon his virtue; his nature breaks down under the temptation. And thus it is that the spacious and fertile acres of the Cherokees are destined, through the devices of the white man, to pass into other hands.
The Nation now numbers about twenty eight thousand souls, consisting of pure and mixed-blood Cherokees, of whites who have intermarried with them, of other tribes absorbed by them, and of negroes who, though socially distinct, have acquired civil rights under their government. Although so composite in character, this people has, for years, been daily becoming more homogeneous in all that appertains to its national life.
Notwithstanding the faults, the failures, and the infirmities of the Cherokee Nation, it may be said to have achieved a splendid victory over the calamities that have, for a hundred years, decimated its numbers and imperiled its life; and history will record that the Cherokee, in his individual progress, has demonstrated “the capability of the American Indian, under favorable conditions, to realize in a high degree the possibilities of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”
How to cite:
King, V. O., "THE CHEROKEE NATION OF INDIANS ", Volume 002, Number 1, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online, Page 58 - 72. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publications/journals/shq/online/v002/n1/article_6.html
[Accessed Mon Dec 1 17:28:50 CST 2008]
