The Cherokee Nation And The Trail Of Tears, by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green

This is the sort of book that could have been considerably better had it been longer. The book, which runs less than 200 pages, really does focus on the trail of tears, and especially on the politicking that went into the efforts of the Cherokee to either face their inevitable removal due to the combined state and federal pressure by Georgia and the Jackson (and Van Buren) administrations or to resist that removal to the blood, and that is a worthwhile focus. The authors, though, clearly mean for the book to be about more than just these subjects, but so little time is spent talking about the earlier history of the Cherokee people (beyond the sad recapitulation of endless betrayals of treaties by British and American settlers who continually encroached upon their lands and demanded that the lands they had squatted on be ceded to them in light of the small population and obvious military weakness of the Cherokee when faced with the might of even individual colonies and states (to say nothing of their combination in the United States), that the book seems incomplete. This sense of incompleteness is especially evident towards the end of the book, where the author deals with the aftermath of the Trail of Tears as well as the divisions of the Civil War.

This book of a bit more than 150 pages is divided into seven chapters. The authors begin with a short introduction that frames the story of Cherokee removal, which was well documented, in the larger context of Indian removal as a whole, which took place over the entire eastern United States in the period between the 1600s and 1800s. Most of these efforts have been largely forgotten, but the Cherokee and their skill at writing and self-promotion allowed their tragedy to be historically documented to a greater extent than other tribes. The authors then discuss the land of the Southern Appalachians as well as the people of the Cherokee through their own myths and the early history of the tribe’s interactions with first British and then American authorities and settlers (1). The authors then discuss the efforts at “civilizing” the Cherokee in early American history that were, if anything, too successful in showing the Cherokee as being apt pupils in adopting such advances as education, the printing press, the development of their own indigenous script, as well as a diverse agricultural and herding economy (2). The authors then discuss how civilization as a goal was changed to removing the natives from the land so that it could be inhabited by white settlers (3). It is no surprise that this policy was resisted consistently by the Cherokee (and others), through every means that they had available to them that would not lead to their extermination (4). An entire chapter is spent on the Treaty of New Echota, which marked the moment when a substantial body of the Cherokee, led by some of the Cherokee Nation’s most eloquent and powerful leaders, abandoned the policy of resistance that Chief Ross and the non-Georgia Cherokees had adopted, for which those leaders would pay for with their lives from their angry fellow Cherokee (5). This is followed by a chapter on the Trail of Tears (6), as well as the efforts on the part of the Cherokee to rebuild their nation in Oklahoma and reunify themselves in the face of growing divisions within the United States as a whole (7). The book ends with a short epilogue which shows the continuing attachment that the Cherokee people have for their beautiful homeland in what is now Northern Alabama and Georgia, Eastern Tennessee, and Western North Carolina, as well as acknowledgements, notes, a select bibliography, and an index.

There is at least one big mystery that this book left me with that would have seemed like it would have been easy enough for the authors to answer. The authors seek to point out how it is that Chief Ross and, in general, the Cherokee leadership sought to promote the unity of the Cherokee people. Yet the Cherokee people are currently divided into three different groups. It is not hard to understand why the main Cherokee nation is separate from the Eastern band who had previously sold their lands and more or less decided to acculturate themselves to American society before the removal of the rest of the nation. But where did the United Keetoowah band come from? It has 10,000 bands, a relatively small size in comparison with the nearly quarter of a million who are a part of the main Cherokee Nation and a bit smaller than the 13,000 or so Eastern Band Cherokee, but still a respectable amount nonetheless. The existence of this third band demonstrates that the efforts on the part of Cherokee leaders to keep the tribe unified in the face of removal and even the division of the Civil War were eventually unsuccessful. Surely that is worth exploring as well? This book is short enough that it would not have taken long to discuss such a matter, and yet it is merely mentioned and not explained at the end of the story, which rightly points out that the Trail of Tears is a part of American history whether we are Cherokee or not or indeed whether we have any Native American ancestry or not.