Special Collections Lecture Series

Appalachian Removals and Relocations:
Cherokee Removal of 1838

Cherokee Leader John Ross Tuesday, March 20
"Cherokee Removal:
A National and Regional Perspective"

John Finger, UT history professor emeritus

The forced removal of all Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River began with the passage of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830. Over the next two decades, government agents negotiated and imposed questionable treaties and agreements on eastern tribes that took their lands and paid their expenses to relocate. By 1850, approximately 100,000 Native Americans had been moved to the West.

In December 1835, agents for the U.S. government negotiated a treaty with a minority group of Cherokees at New Echota, Georgia, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. Signed by only twenty Cherokees, none elected officials of the Cherokee Nation, the treaty ceded all Cherokee territory east of the Mississippi in exchange for $5 million and new land in Indian Territory in what is now Eastern Oklahoma. Cherokees who resisted the treaty were collected at gunpoint in the summer of 1838 and placed in stockades and camps in preparation for removal west. Approximately 16,000 men, women, and children made the 800-mile journey to Indian Territory under adverse conditions that resulted in a high rate of illness and death. That journey is remembered as the "Trail of Tears".

Cherokee removal and relocation led to other diverse groups funneling into Southern Appalachia. Nearly 170 years later the influence of the Cherokee in Appalachia remains.