Dig Adds to Cherokee "Trail of Tears" History

Willie Drye
for National Geographic News
January 23, 2006


Archaeologists working in the rugged mountains of southwestern North
Carolina are adding new details to the story of a tragedy that took
place more than 160 years ago.

The scientists are uncovering the remains of farms and homes
belonging to the Cherokee Indians before they were forced to abandon
their property and move to Oklahoma.

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About 16,000 Cherokee and hundreds of other Native Americans were
forced out of North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama in the
late 1830s. The event came to be known among the Cherokee as the
Trail of Tears.

Brett Riggs, an archaeologist with the University of North
Carolina's
Research Laboratories of Archaeology, is leading the excavations. He
said the relocation of the Indians was a form of ethnic cleansing.

"A group of people in possession of sovereign territory with a
sovereign government were forced to abandon that land, and were
forcibly deported," Riggs said.

"They were detained by the U.S. military, and then moved away from
their homes to open the area for settlement by a whole different
population. That fits the bill for describing ethnic cleansing as
well as anything I can think of."

Everyday Life

Riggs and his crew of UNC archaeologists are working about 90 miles
(145 kilometers) southwest of Asheville. They're uncovering remnants
of the Cherokee's lives before they were rounded up and moved west.

"What we're finding in the ground is the stuff of everyday life—
refuse, people's trash," Riggs said. "In terms of documenting the
Trail, this confirms that these particular sites were associated
with
Cherokee families."

The archaeologists have recovered pieces of pottery and china,
buttons, glass, cast-iron cook pots, and other artifacts.

"These objects suggest that the lifestyle of the Cherokee on one
hand
was surprisingly modern and westernized but that they were still
very
distinctive and native," Riggs said.

In 1987, the U.S. Congress included about 2,200 miles (3,500
kilometers) of the Trail of Tears in the National Park Service's
National Trails System.

But the federally recognized segment of the trail begins in eastern
Tennessee, where assembly camps for the Cherokee were established to
prepare for the trek west.

A bill is pending in Congress to include other sections of the trail
in the national system. If approved, the legislation would also
provide money to mark sections of the trail and erect displays to
tell the story.

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Some National Park Service officials think the UNC excavation will
help justify adding about 130 miles (210 kilometers) of trails
through the North Carolina mountains to the National Trails System.

"In reality, the Trail of Tears started at the doorstep of every
Cherokee who was forced out of their house," said John Conoboy, an
administrator with the National Trails System in Santa Fe, New
Mexico.

Forced Resettlement

The decision to move eastern Indians is rooted in the U.S. purchase
of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803.

When white settlers moved into the newly acquired land, they began
pressing the federal government to remove Native Americans east of
the Mississippi River.

The pressure to move the Indians increased in 1829 when gold was
discovered on Cherokee land in northern Georgia.

A small group of Cherokee signed a treaty in 1835 agreeing to leave
their lands. Although the group didn't represent the entire Cherokee
Nation, the U.S. government used the treaty as justification for
rounding up the Indians and forcing them to move to what is now
Oklahoma.

Most Cherokee were angry and deeply resentful, and some saw
indications of divine displeasure as well.

In August 1838 William Shorey Coodey was one of several hundred
Cherokee who started the journey from a detention center near the
Georgia-Tennessee border.

At the moment the command was given for the caravan to move out,
thunder rumbled ominously from the west.

Coodey later wrote in a letter: "In almost an exact westward
direction a dark spiral cloud was rising above the horizon and … I
almost fancied a voice of divine indignation for the wrongs of my
poor and unhappy countrymen, driven by brutal powers from all they
loved and cherished in the land of their fathers, to gratify the
cravings of avarice."

A few hundred Cherokee managed to avoid relocation and stayed in the
North Carolina mountains. But for the rest, as many as 15 percent
died during the journey west, and the dislocation had a profound
psychological effect on the tribe.

"I believe that it was very traumatic," said Jack Baker, a Cherokee
who is a retired insurance accountant in Oklahoma City. "The
Cherokee
people have very few stories of what happened during the removal."

"The older people who endured it wouldn't talk about it because it
was too painful. That's very unusual."

Human Details

A dry and clinical tale of the relocation was left behind in records
compiled by the federal government and missionaries of the Moravian
Protestant sect in western North Carolina.

Riggs, the UNC archaeologist, used some of those records to figure
out where to look for abandoned Cherokee farms.

Historians are praising the work the UNC archaeologists are doing to
add human details to the story.

"There isn't much known, so this is very significant work," said
Aaron Mahr, a National Park Service historian in Santa Fe. "We
really
have an incomplete understanding of Cherokee culture in the 1830s
and
of the removal experience in general."

There are other reasons for learning more about the relocation of
the
Cherokee, said Jane Eastman, an anthropology professor at Western
Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Eastman also is
president of the North Carolina Chapter of the Trail of Tears
Association.

"There's this idea that America is a place where this type of thing
couldn't happen," Eastman said. "We think of ethnic cleansing as
happening in the former Soviet bloc. It's important to understand
that not only could it happen here, but it has happened here."

Willie Drye is the author of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day
Hurricane of 1935, published by National Geographic Books.