Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

John Ross moved to the West, of course. He departed with the final group of Cherokees in December 1838. They took the water route, and it was apparently on a riverboat that Ross’s wife, Quatie, died in early 1839. She was buried after the boat tied up at Little Rock, Arkansas. Ross continued on to the Cherokees’ western territory, where he was confirmed in his continued leadership of the Cherokee Nation.

  Soon afterward the Treaty Party was decapitated: Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot were all murdered in their homes.

  The killers were never identified. No evidence linked John Ross to the crime, though it is reasonable to suppose that some part of the Cherokee leadership endorsed the coordinated assassination, just as Cherokee leaders endorsed killing Doublehead for selling land many years before. Ross, not yet fifty at the time of the killings, remained the leader of his nation through another generation—all the way until the Civil War, when many Cherokees fought for the Confederacy, though Ross tried to remain on the side of the Union, and many Cherokees also fought and died on the Union side. Ross lived long enough to see the Union prevail. In 1865, Ross was in Washington for the second inauguration of President Lincoln, which he described in an exultant letter home to Mary Ross, his second wife: “The clouds vanished and the rain ceased to fall—behold, the effulgent rays of the noonday sun shown out upon the great multitude that assembled, around the magnificent Capitol of the Nation.” Ross died in 1866, just as his nation was completing a peace treaty with the United States. The treaty, in the customary manner, required Cherokees to cede some of the land that had previously been granted to them forever.

  Land assigned to Cherokees and many other nations was known as the Indian Territory. In the early twentieth century a movement arose for Indian Territory to seek the status of a state—the future that Ross seemed to have envisioned for his nation as early as 1825. Residents, both Indian and white, participated in drawing up a proposed constitution for the state of Sequoyah. President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration rejected the idea, instead incorporating Indian Territory with non-Indian areas to form the state of Oklahoma.

  That was the story of the Cherokee Nation in the West, but there was also a continuing story of Cherokees in the East. Some simply would not be removed from their ancient homeland. During the early phases of the removal in 1838 it had been clear that a few Cherokees would stay; a number of Cherokees in North Carolina had embraced provisions in old treaties that allowed them to claim U.S. citizenship. To these few in 1838 were added fugitives from the forces of Winfield Scott. The Smoky Mountains and the surrounding terrain in far western North Carolina were the least accessible areas of all the Cherokee country, and there some Cherokees hid after eluding the soldiers.

  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 Iris
h-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.

  Before he invented the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse was a painter who in 1822 depicted the House of Representatives in session. The Marquis de Lafayette spoke here in 1824; in 1830 it was the scene of a close vote on the Indian Removal Act.

  Cherokee legislators met in a more modest wooden council house, which has been reconstructed at the site of the former Cherokee capital at New Echota.

  Major Ridge, a Cherokee friend of Andrew Jackson and a vital ally of John Ross at the beginning.

  Henry Clay, Jackson’s rival, who opposed Indian removal even though he said the extinction of Indians would be “no great loss to the world.”

  John Ross’s signature on an 1834 note requesting a meeting with President Jackson.

  Andrew Jackson’s postscript on an 1838 letter demanding “Why is it that the Scamp Ross is not banished from the notice of the administration [?]”

  Catharine Beecher, a Connecticut teacher who became author of the “Ladies’ Circular,” which opposed Indian removal: “It may be that female petitioners can lawfully be heard, even by the highest rulers of our land.”

  Cherokees were cleared from their farms at the head of the Coosa River, which included the home of Major Ridge and also one of the homes of John Ross. The settlement was renamed Rome, Georgia, and remains today a prosperous manufacturing center. The stores and restaurants on the main street include the Old Havana Cigar Co., established in 2003 and decorated with a wooden Indian.

  The Cherokee settlement called Ross’s Landing grew into the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. In the late nineteenth century, the Walnut Street Bridge was built near the site of Ross’s Landing to connect the city’s downtown to the north side of the Tennessee River.

  This cluster of signs suggests the layering of cultures in the modern-day city of Cherokee, North Carolina. The street signs are in both English and Cherokee. Paul’s Family Restaurant offers “Indian tacos,” while a local Catholic church offers a weekly service in Spanish, reflecting yet another migration to this part of North America.

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing this book required me to join a centuries-old argument. Martin Van Buren was right: he predicted that while other controversies that “agitated the public mind in their day” would fade, the emotions aroused by Indian removal would probably “endure … as long as the government itself.” Each generation of Americans has interpreted Indian removal differently—arguing at different times that it was inevitable, tragic, genocidal, better left unexamined, or, in the words of an early Jackson biographer, “wise and humane.”

  Division and Reunion, a popular history of the United States published in 1893, declared that white men “very naturally” would not tolerate red men setting up a government in their midst. The book all but excused subverting the law to remove them. The author was Woodrow Wilson, and his history was still in print after he was elected president in 1912. A Georgia school textbook in 1913 said slave owners “were as religious, moral, high-minded a race of men who ever lived,” and described the removal of Creeks and Cherokees as an obvious practical response to the problem that their land was needed for white settlement. But there were always dissenting opinions, and gradually the acts Wilson called “natural” became controversial. Historians in the 1930s highlighted the cruelties of Indian removal, while those who admired Jackson found it necessary to emphasize other parts of his career. In 1945 Arthur Schlesinger won a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Jackson, which made a case for Jackson as a hero of democracy, and mentioned Indian removal in a single passing phrase.

  In later years, Howard Zinn’s best-selling A People’s History of the United States went to the opposite extreme, taking a wild swing at Jackson, while the ethnographer Ronald Takaki labeled him “the Metaphysician of Indian-Hating,” playing off a phrase penned by Herman Melville. Even the visitor center at the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Tennessee, began playing a documentary on Jackson’s life that acknowledged many Indians viewed him as “
the devil.” In 2009, Congress passed and President Barack Obama quietly signed a formal apology for the Trail of Tears. But Congress also specified that Native Americans could not use the apology to reclaim land, and the historical pendulum was already swinging back. Recent Jackson biographers, such as Jon Meacham and H. W. Brands, candidly described the human cost of Jackson’s policy while keeping it in the perspective of his broader career. Sean Wilentz, in The Rise of American Democracy, observed that while Jackson was a “paternalist,” telling Indians what was best for them, that was not the same as genocide.

  One especially intriguing treatment of America’s engagement with native nations is a project that was never finished. Starting in 1888, Theodore Roosevelt devoted some of his phenomenal energy to writing The Winning of the West, which chronicled western settlement from colonial times onward. In his role as a historian, Roosevelt documented brutal violence: settlers and Indians disregarded the rules of war, and even noncombatants were “harried without ruth.” As an ardent nationalist, however, Roosevelt insisted that this ruthlessness was redeemed by the result. The spread of civilization was a noble task, America had its destiny to fulfill, and critics of the ugly methods were overlooking the “race-importance” of the work. Roosevelt’s four volumes continued the story up to the start of the nineteenth century. He never finished two additional books in which he intended to bring forward the story into the 1830s. The later volumes necessarily would have covered many of the events of Jacksonland.

  I came to think of Jacksonland as a modern substitute for one of Roosevelt’s missing volumes. While discarding his theories of “race-importance,” I found something valuable in his insistence upon the cold reality of events. Facts should be pursued “without ruth.” And that included facts about John Ross, who like Jackson has been portrayed differently at different times. The Cherokees by Grace Steele Woodward makes him a beloved hero, while Trail of Tears by John Ehle paints a stubborn egotist “determined to defeat removal and extol himself.” Some writers do not even describe Ross as an Indian; Toward the Setting Sun by Brian Hicks styles him “the first white man to champion the voiceless Native American cause.” It took me time to recognize that the complexity of Ross’s story is the point of it. His mixed culture and ancestry, not to mention his membership in the great tribe of politicians, make him a modern figure, and cast a different light on our past.