“My travel to the West was much earlier than yours—and faster, too. I have been at the river a long while. Every time I learned that new arrivals were near, I’d ride out to meet them. At last you have come! My search has ended, and I am sad and happy, both.”
“We’re going to live close to Uncle Swimming Bear and Aunt Kee,” Hawk Boy said. “He has already started building his house, and he says he’ll teach me how he fishes and—”
“Shhh,” Uncle Swimming Bear interrupted Hawk Boy. “Tomorrow’s travel will be long. Soft Rain needs to rest.”
He lifted Hawk Boy down from the wagon. Then, before he also jumped out, Uncle Swimming Bear whispered, “I found a puppy for you, Soft Rain. She’s brown. Hawk Boy says you’ll need this.” He laid Pet’s rope across Soft Rain’s lap.
Shivering with excitement, she touched the rope. Then she felt inside the pocket of the dress. Grandmother’s doll was still there.
Lying down, she pulled the blanket over her. But sleep didn’t come. Instead, memories of the past year whirled round and round inside her head.
Father said that tomorrow we will be home in the West. The journey has been hard. How long we have traveled I cannot remember, but I will ask Aunt Kee, for I want to know. I want to tell the story about why we left our beautiful mountain home and how we traveled to the West. In the story I will tell about Pet and Grandmother, who were left behind; about Green Fern, who died; about Old Roving Man, who vanished; and about the soldiers and the doll. I’ll begin,
“When I was a young girl the soldiers came. We cried and cried, sad to leave our home and our loved ones. We traveled west across rivers, valleys, and mountains …”
ABOUT THE CHEROKEE NATION
IN NOVEMBER OF 1785 A TREATY BETWEEN the Cherokee Nation and the U.S. government was signed. This Hopewell Treaty “solemnly guaranteed forever” the boundary between the Cherokee Nation and that of the United States and placed the Cherokees under the protection of the U.S. government. Just six years later, white settlers were already crossing the lines set by this treaty.
The history of the Cherokee Nation is one of constant struggle to enforce its rightful boundaries. As early as 1817 the U.S. government had begun its attempts to relocate the Cherokees to the West; in exchange for their eastern land, the Cherokees would receive an equal area in Arkansas. But those who chose not to move were soon evicted. By 1821 the majority of Tennessee Cherokees had already been forced out.
Between 1828 and 1830 the Georgia state government enacted a series of laws that annexed all Cherokee lands (then later distributed the land through lottery to white citizens), annulled all laws and ordinances of the Cherokee Nation, closed Cherokee courts, and forbade all political gatherings. The Cherokees reluctantly left their tribal capital of New Echota, moving their government to Red Clay, Tennessee.
But it was in 1835 that the most tragic episode in Cherokee history began. The treaty of New Echota, signed by several members of the newly formed Cherokee Treaty Party, surrendered all remaining Cherokee land east of the Mississippi River. On May 17, 1837, the treaty was formally approved by the U.S. Congress. Six days later it was signed by President Andrew Jackson. The Cherokees were given two years to remove themselves.
Despite a protest letter signed by nearly sixteen thousand Cherokee men, women, and children, the treaty was upheld. A military headquarters was established at New Echota, and the enforced relocation was begun. Between October and November of 1838 the greater part of the Cherokee Nation took final leave of its beloved homeland. (Approximately fourteen hundred Cherokees did not remove, but chose to hide through the severe winter in hills and caves.) Of the eighteen thousand who left, some four thousand died in stockades or on the trail before the last group arrived in Oklahoma on March 25, 1839.
Today there are about eighty-five thousand tribal members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, mostly residing in North Carolina and descended from those Cherokees who escaped the relocation soldiers, numbers more than nine thousand.
The Cherokee name is a mystery. Tsalagi (zhă′ lă-gĭ′) may come from tsalu, meaning “tobacco,” and agaawli, “old” or “ancient”: “ancient tobacco people.” Or it may be derived from A-tsila-gi-ga-i, which means “red fire men.” The color red was the Cherokee emblem of bravery, and bravery was believed to come from the east, where the sun rose. If this is so, Tsalagi may mean “children of the sun” or “brave men.”
SUGGESTED READING FOR CHILDREN
Bealer, Alex W. Only the Names Remain. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. Paperback edition.
Chiltoskey, Mary Ulmer. Cherokee Words with Pictures. Cherokee, NC: Cherokee Publications, 1988. A small dictionary.
Fleischmann, Glen. The Cherokee Removal, 1838. New York: Franklin Watts, 1971. Out of print, but still available in libraries.
Hoig, Stanley. Night of the Cruel Moon. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1996. For older readers.
Stein, R. Conrad. The Trail of Tears. Chicago: Children’s Press, Inc., 1993.
Underwood, Thomas Bryan. Cherokee Legends and the Trail of Tears. Cherokee, NC: Cherokee Publications, 1997.
Underwood, Thomas Bryan. The Story of the Cherokee People. Cherokee, NC: Cherokee Publications, 1961.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nonfiction
Ehle, John. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: Anchor, 1989.
Foreman, Grant. Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.
Gilbert, Joan. The Trail of Tears Across Missouri. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
McLoughlin, William Gerald. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Mankiller, Wilma, and Michael Wallis. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Nashville: Charles and Randy Elder, Booksellers-Publishers, 1982. From 7th and 19th Annual Reports, Bureau of American Ethnology.
Museum of the Cherokee Indian. The Ten-Year Treasury of Cherokee Studies, vols. I-IV. Cherokee, NC: Cherokee Publications, 1976-1985.
Perdue, Theda. The Cherokee. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989.
Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Second ed.
Woodward, Grace Steele. The Cherokees. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.
Fiction
Conley, Robert J. Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
Daves, Frances M. Cherokee Woman. Boston: Branden Press, 1973.
Glancy, Diane. Pushing the Bear. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1996.
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Copyright © 1998 by Cornelia Cornelissen
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