Cherokee Country Research Articles

Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Greene

Reviewed by: Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Greene Noel E. Smyth Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina. By Lance Greene. Indians and Southern History. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022. Pp. xvi, 184. $54.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2112-3.) In Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, historical archaeologist Lance Greene investigates a community of Cherokees that evaded the Trail of Tears by absconding to Welch’s Town, North Carolina, from 1839 to 1855. A mixed-descent Cherokee man named John Welch and his wife, Betty, a white woman, owned a plantation there, and in 1838 they offered land and resources to nearly one hundred Cherokees who settled in the mountains on their property. Greene argues that the “hybrid space” of the plantation enabled the Welches to conceal and protect their community (p. 133). He shows how this hybrid [End Page 140] community was able to maintain a traditional Cherokee emphasis on localism and town-centered politics even as some individuals also practiced European-derived chattel slavery. The book is organized chronologically, with the first and second chapters providing a narrative overview of Cherokee history from the early republic to the Trail of Tears. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters offer an analysis of the material remains excavated by Greene at the Welch plantation site in 2004 and 2006. From the material remains, Greene reconstructs the political economy of Welch’s Town, which included the use of slave labor to grow surplus grains, and describes how this production was supplemented with subsistence farming and traditional gathering and hunting activities practiced by Cherokees residing in the hills behind the Welch plantation. Betty Welch ran the plantation’s outward-facing business, which allowed her and her husband to accrue wealth and to have some limited influence in southern American society. Betty and John Welch held at least nine enslaved African Americans in bondage, and Greene argues that “their success and the associated success of Welch’s Town depended upon the enslaved community on the plantation” (p. 134). This book adds to the growing literature on slavery in Cherokee country and the ways in which some Cherokees adopted chattel slavery to secure liminal spaces for themselves as Native peoples in the ante-bellum South. Greene is also interested in answering the question, “What was life like for the enslaved people, mostly women and children, held captive by the Welches?” (p. 105). The book, however, does not offer many satisfying answers. Furthermore, Green argues, “Ironically, those African Americans held in bondage enabled a small number of Cherokee families to challenge white hegemony.” He does not explain how “establishing plantation estates” defied “the ideology of white supremacy” (p. 21). The adoption of slavery by some elite Cherokee families seems to be another example of cultural hybridity, rather than a rejection of white supremacy. At the heart of this book is a marginalized community of Cherokees that resisted ethnic cleansing and also adopted chattel slavery in order to secure their survival. This fundamental dynamic could have been more deeply and productively analyzed, but the book leaves this critical tension underexplored. To Greene’s credit, he is careful to point out that Cherokee slaveholders could be just as cruel as white slaveholders, but in other areas of the book there are claims that are jarring and out of step with current arguments about slavery. Overall, this book is an important addition to our understanding of both Cherokee survival in North Carolina after 1838 and how the adoption of chattel slavery was used by some Native Americans to secure the survival of their communities in the antebellum South. The book does not offer much that is new about the history of chattel slavery or the specific experiences and lives of those enslaved at Welch’s Town. However, despite this limitation, the book provides a detailed and extensive account of Welch’s Town and of how Cherokee identity and localism remained strong among those communities through the nineteenth century and beyond. [End...

Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827 ed. by Richard W. Starbuck

Reviewed by: Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827 ed. by Richard W. Starbuck John Ellisor Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827. Edited by Richard W. Starbuck. (Tahlequah, Okla.: Cherokee Heritage Press, 2017. Pp. xxii, 3255-3768. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-9826907-9-6.) The correspondence in this volume of the Moravian records continues to reveal the day-to-day efforts of the Moravian missionaries in spreading their religion among Native Americans in a time of great uncertainty and stress for the Cherokee Nation. The missionaries, Johann Renatus Schmidt at Springplace and John Gambold at Oochgeelogy mission, detail a variety of their problems: incompetent assistants, poor finances, competition from the Methodists and Native leaders, and even an overabundance of venomous serpents in their gardens and kitchens. But the men also speak of successes: the building of a mission house and new school for Cherokee youths at Oochgeelogy, the strong support of the nation's two principal chiefs, the new converts, and a wave of religious fervor sweeping the Cherokee country aided, no doubt, by the Second Great Awakening and, more particularly, by the work of Methodist evangelists and their emotional appeals. Nevertheless, the doom "cloud of removal" hung over the Moravian missionaries and the Cherokees during this period (p. xvii). In 1825 the Creek headman William McIntosh, who had close ties to the Cherokees, accepted a $50,000 bribe to cede all of the Creek lands to the United States. Creek leaders executed McIntosh for his treachery, but the Creek country bordered that of the Cherokees, and Natives and missionaries alike knew that if the federal government allowed the treaty to stand and forced the Creeks to move to the West, the Cherokees would be the next targets of fraudulent dispossession. In fact, Brother Schmidt stated that he believed the government's treaty commissioners could certainly find '"Halfbreeds and other Speculators'" willing to take bribes to cede land (p. 3319). But at first, Schmidt seemed to secretly support removal as a cure for the Cherokee Nation's problems. He decried the fact that wealthy slave-owning Cherokees of mixed descent controlled the nation's affairs, while the poor Indians starved in a country depleted of game. He saw murders increasing in the land along with corruption spread by intruding white settlers. All helped convince Schmidt that the movement west would give the Cherokees and missionaries a fresh start and a brighter future. Fortunately, the federal government did not honor McIntosh's treaty and compel the Creeks to move beyond the Mississippi River. Accordingly, the furor over removal died down somewhat in the Cherokee country. In the interim, Schmidt had time to further assess Cherokee public opinion and decided that they were determined to stay where they were and defend their country. Consequently, he changed his view of emigration and, like most Moravians, proclaimed that removal would actually demolish everything the Cherokees and missionaries had built. And, indeed, the Cherokees did continue to build their own republic as a means of holding on to their nation as it existed in portions of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The Moravian correspondence notes that Sequoyah invented his syllabary in 1825, allowing the Cherokees to read and write their own language and the missionaries to produce Cherokee hymnals and bibles. The Cherokee National [End Page 434] Council also authorized the printing of a national newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, as well as building a national academy at New Echota, the Cherokee capital. Then, in 1827, the National Council adopted a constitution similar to that of the United States, adding to all their other accomplishments as a "civilized" Indian nation. However, the Moravians and Cherokees suffered great losses that year. The Cherokees' longtime principal chief, Pathkiller, and his successor and friend of the Moravians, Charles Renatus Hicks, died within two weeks of each other. And following those two men, Brother Gambold passed to his reward after many years of service in the Cherokee country. Moreover, the Cherokees and Moravians had to know that...

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd, and: Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America by Russ Castronovo

Reviewed by: Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd, and: Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America by Russ Castronovo Ann Marie Plane (bio) Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier gregory evans dowd Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015 391 pp. Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America russ castronovo New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 247 pp. These two books tackle the problem of communication in the worlds of early North America. Each sheds light on the complexities of [End Page 274] these processes, even as it engages the historicity of such processes with less success. Such an errand into the wilderness could hardly be timelier in the post-Trump era of fake news sites, Facebook echo chambers, and a heightened awareness of media manipulation as a tool of power. It is unfortunate, therefore, that each book stumbles in its attempt to deliver on its promising conception. Gregory Evans Dowd offers a persuasive opening chapter on the cultural importance of rumor. Reading along, I wondered how it could be that historians have so thoroughly neglected this topic. Dowd reaches back to the foundational text of many a historiography class, Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, and finds in the work of Bloch, and in that of his contemporary Georges LeFebvre, a close attention to false stories, and how, particularly in wartime contexts, such stories influence consequential actions. Dowd draws lightly on the work of sociologists, particularly Tamotsu Shibutani, remarking on their attention to how rumors gain power and credibility. After introducing these various currents, however, Dowd pulls back from advancing any particular conclusions regarding the role of rumor-cum-legend in shaping historical memory. Instead, Dowd asserts that his work "mainly seeks to investigate the power and significance that literally groundless rumors and legends held in their own day … even if some of those tales persist and distort history" (13). His work, then, relies on "examin[ing] a selection of unverified tales told by colonizers and Native Americans that punctuated eastern North American history from the sixteenth century to about 1850" (2). Dowd focuses sometimes on the Southeast, sometimes on the eastern woodlands area of North America; he identifies two key bookends for his tale, beginning with sixteenth-century Spanish rumors of gold in the region and ending with Georgia's discovery of gold in Cherokee country in the 1820s. In between, Dowd organizes the narrative around large-scale "longitudinal" tales in parts 1, 3, and 5 (things like gold, small pox, slavery) and "episodic" tales—more particular stories of specific rumors and their fates in both frontier and metropole in parts 2, 4, and 6. Dowd eschews analysis of the precise nature of the social context in which rumors live. He notes only that "[s]ince the early twentieth century we have called this medium, variously, worldview, collective consciousness, ideology, mentality, discourse, episteme, expectation, and even hegemonic discourse," noting that he prefers to "sidestep the semantic fray, exploring the stuff of the rumors and legends themselves" (11). In some respects, he has to [End Page 275] do this, since the capacious chronological framework of his book encompasses several arguably discrete social milieux, each of which would likely have its own media, patterns, and procedures. Dowd's investigation stretches from the first Spanish entradas of the sixteenth century to the playoff systems among British, French, Spanish, and native power centers in the eighteenth, to the crushing expulsions of the Jacksonian era during the United States' early Republic period. Casting such a broad net, however, makes it very hard to offer any systematic analysis of what cultural preconceptions ground some false stories, enabling them to gain lasting traction, while others disappear on a fickle wind. One might expect, in Dowd's narratives of the particular ("episodes"), these problems could be overcome by maintaining a much tighter focus on the origin, dissemination, and ultimate fate of the frontier's "flying tales." This does not happen in every such treatment. One of the more useful examples, however, comes in his discussion of Benjamin Franklin's hoax, circulated as useful disinformation in April 1782, through...

Natives, Women, Debtors, and Slaves: Christian Priber's American Utopia

Natives, Women, Debtors, and SlavesChristian Priber's American Utopia Eric E. Bowne (bio) and Crystal A. Bowne (bio) Between 1736 and 1743 Christian Gottlieb Priber, a German lawyer and intellectual living among the Overhill Cherokees, attempted to form a republic of Indian nations that has been variously described as a "lost utopia" or a "new red empire."1 Priber married into the family of a prominent Cherokee leader and came to be an influential man himself, advising the Overhill towns to embrace both French and British traders but not to part with any more of their land. He also taught them how to build and operate their own steelyards so as not to be cheated by European merchants, and he promised to bring someone to the Cherokee country who could teach them how to make their own gunpowder. In 1738, after having received a number of inflammatory letters from Priber (which he signed as secretary of state), the Charles Town council sent forces to arrest the German, but the Cherokees would not allow it. For the next five years Priber worked to establish his vision of society, a society that embraced liberty and equality for all its members—male and female; black, white, and red; princes, paupers, and slaves alike. Priber was finally apprehended by the English in 1743 while attempting to recruit the Creek Indians into his "empire," and he was taken along with all his papers to Fort Frederica on the Georgia coast, where he apparently "died in Goal."2 Priber, a man who, on the one hand, "spoke Latin, French, Spanish, and German fluently and English brokenly" and had the education and upbringing to entertain the gentlemen of Frederica and, on the other hand, "ate, drank, slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the natives," has long intrigued students of southern colonial history.3 Yet although [End Page 56] Priber has been referenced in dozens of secondary sources throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only four papers of original scholarship concerning Priber have been published in English, the most recent of which appeared over forty years ago.4 Those papers give us a tantalizing glimpse of Priber's history, motives, and actions but leave much unanswered. To be sure, some of our questions are unanswerable, but the available evidence, sparse as it is, can be taken further. We can begin to tackle some of the most important questions by contextualizing Priber's story. What was Priber really trying to do, and what were his inspirations? Why did he choose to carry out his experiment in America among the Cherokees? How did Priber gain acceptance among his Native hosts? What did the Cherokees think of him, and how did they influence his vision? Why did South Carolina officials fear him? How close did Priber come to succeeding, and what stopped him? The primary sources regarding Priber are limited in the extreme. In addition to being briefly mentioned in a number of colonial records, letters, and newspapers, Priber is discussed in more detail in only half a dozen sources. Ludovick Grant, an English trader with a factory in the Overhill towns, sent an account of the German to the council in Charles Town, informing them of the politics he was espousing among the people of the nation.5 Antoine Bonnefay spent a considerable amount of time with Priber between February 13 and April 29, 1743, while Bonnefay was a prisoner of the Cherokees.6 The published journal of his experiences includes the fullest description of Priber's plan that remains, along with a few tantalizing hints of the German's history.7 James Adair, an English trader who corresponded with him for part of a year in 1738–39, devoted three pages to Priber in his book The History of the American Indians, published in 1775, including a detailed (perhaps eye-witness) description of the second failed attempt to arrest the German in 1739.8 A journalist known only by his nom de plume, Americus, spoke with Priber at length over a period of several months during his captivity at Fort Frederica in 1743–44. The...

Violence and the competition for sovereignty in Cherokee Country, 1829–1835

ABSTRACTBeginning in 1829 with the discovery of gold and ending in 1835 with the ratification of the Treaty of New Echota, three political entities waged a struggle for political sovereignty over the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees, of course, had their national self-determination at stake. They referenced treaties with the U.S. government that reaffirmed their status as an independent nation, but also looked to the federal government and its commitments in those same treaties to help the Cherokees uphold their territorial integrity. In this formulation, which the Supreme Court verified, the federal government reigned supreme. The ambiguous nature of American federalism also made it possible for the state of Georgia to claim sovereignty. Beginning in 1830, the state used violence against Cherokees under the guise of bringing social order to a lawless region. The vehicle for creating state authority, the Georgia Guard, used violence as a way of making life untenable for those the state saw as less than desirable. Criminals, especially members of the Pony Club, and Cherokees, were deliberately targeted by the Guard. Federal authorities eventually relented and relied on state figures to help pave the way for the implementation of Removal. By doing so, they effectively ceded political sovereignty to the state.

New Trees, New Medicines, New Wars: The Chickasaw Removal

New Trees, New Medicines, New Wars:The Chickasaw Removal* Linda Hogan Trail of Tears: Our Removal With lines unseen the land was broken.When surveyors came, we knewwhat the prophet had said was true,this land with lines unseen, would be taken,and we’d never see pay. So, you who live there now,don’t forget to love it, thank itthe place that was once our forests, the ponds, the mosses,the swamplands with birds and more lowly creatures. As for us, we walked into the military strength of hungerand war for that land we still dream.As the ferry crossed the distance,or the walkers left behind their loved ones,think how we took along our cats and kittens, the puppieswe also loved, and the horses, so many,one by one stolen, taken by the many thievesalong the trail. We took clothing, dishes,thinking there would be something to start new life,believing justice lived in the world,So have compassion for that land at least. Every step was one away from the songs,old dances, memories, some of us dark and not speaking English,some of us white, or married to the dark, children of the translators [End Page 121] the half-white, all of us watched by America, all of uslonging for trees for shading, homing, rooting,even for food along this way. You would think those of us born laterwould fight for justice, for peace,for the new land, its trees being taken.You would thinkthe struggle would be overbetween the two worlds, in this placethat is now our knowledgeour new belonging, our being,and we’d never again care for the notion of mapsor American wars, or the god of their sky,thinking of those things we were forced to leave behind,moving country, stolen home,the world measured inch by inch, mile by mile,hectares, all measurements, even the trail of our tears. With all the new fierce light, heat, droughtthe missing water, you’d thinkin another red century, the old wisdommight exist if we considered enoughthat even before the new beliefswe were once whole,that now our bodies and minds remainthe measured geography. L.H. New Trees, New Medicines, New Wars: The Chickasaw Removal We do not want the land of any red people; the United States have land enough. (Andrew Jackson, US President) In spite of President Jackson’s words, promises, and a stack of treaties with us, he forced through The Indian Removal Bill in 1830. Tribal nations from the entire country were to be removed into what is now called “Oklahoma,” beginning with the major Southeastern Indian nations. At the time, the new location was known only as “Indian Territory.” The U.S. government’s plan was to eventually place all the indigenous peoples into this territory and to build a large fence around it so none could leave or escape. Removal began almost immediately with our sister nation, the Choctaw, and [End Page 122] continued with smaller parties of other tribes. Nearly all of the removals were difficult, some by water, some by land, but all crossing the Misssissippi River. After one boatload of people drowned, water travel was not a frequent choice. The Cherokee Removal is the most documented, for they declined to leave. The people were finally forced to leave at gunpoint, rounded up and penned in stock pens. This took place at the time gold was found in Cherokee country. New laws were enacted, so they could not take their case to court or appeal to the federal government for their own safety. Their removal is the most well documented one, with a great loss of life, but certainly not the only tragic journey to the new lands. All the forced removals resulted in deaths and trauma. As for us, the Chickasaw, we prolonged our departure. Our leadership had journeyed to the new region more than once to find suitable lands. Finally, after several trips across the great artery of water, the Mississippi River...

Natural Affinities: The Political Economy and Ecology of Desire in William Bartram’s Southern Gulf

Natural Affinities: The Political Economy and Ecology of Desire in William Bartram’s Southern Gulf Rob McLoone (bio) The end of the colonial era and the rise of the United States nation state brought drastic changes to the borderland regions of the American Southeast. For much of the eighteenth century, the Southeast was a decidedly inter-colonial space, with England, France, and Spain seeking to establish lucrative trade arrangements and routes among the powerful Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek nations that dominated the region. Despite these colonial pressures, many native groups sustained a measure of political and economic autonomy by continually repositioning themselves at the center of a delicate balance of power, often playing one empire off another. With American independence, however, international involvement in the region waned, trading options disappeared, and southeastern native groups and confederacies increasingly found themselves facing off with the U.S.: a single nation that was far more interested in land speculation and westward expansion than it was in equitable trade and diplomacy. As historians such as Robbie Ethridge and Claudio Saunt have demonstrated, the native populations of the Southeast faced a new world of changing market desires, where colonial systems of hospitality, gift-giving, and [End Page 67] cross-cultural affiliation were quickly diminishing under the growing shadow of the U.S. and its prospects of empire. Between 1773 and 1777, the Quaker botanist William Bartram traveled and lived among southeastern native peoples. This article presents his account of that journey, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, as a literary effort to envision a world in which the older, colonial modes of economic association and affiliation could persist despite the discourses of assimilation and conquest that, by the time Bartram finally published his book in 1791, had come to dominate the national conversation. Existing historical and critical works by Douglas Anderson, Edward J. Cashin, Erica Hannickel, and others have done much to connect the Travels to Bartram’s concerns — clearly voiced elsewhere in his manuscripts — about the larger issues and events pertaining to independence and U.S. nationhood during these tumultuous years. This scholarship has shown that although the Travels sometimes seems to offer a romantic, even disconnected, view of the period, it is actually in dialogue with many of the debates and emerging ideologies surrounding early U.S. imperialism, Indian policy, and the structure of the Federal state. The humble botanist, after all, composed and edited much of his book while the U.S. Constitution was taking shape not far from his home in Philadelphia. He was also conscious of enjoying some public authority—due, in part, to the legacy of William’s father, the botanist John Bartram, and his transatlantic plant and seed business, which continued to make the Bartram name well-known among the learned and prominent men of the age. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Secretary of War Henry Knox number among the many who sought out the younger Bartram’s advice or visited him at his garden. Here, I hope to expand our understanding of the political dimension and purpose of Bartram’s book by considering the Travels as a work of applied economic theory: an intermixing of political economy and ecology wherein the modes of affiliation and friendship that Bartram valued (quite highly) between whites and natives would remain essential to the social order of the Southeast. While Bartram’s political-economic vision in Travels encompasses southeastern peoples and regions rather widely (as did the actual route of his journey), the narrative particularly presents the lower-Seminole towns of Cuscowilla and Talahasochte — located on Florida’s central plain and the western coast of the [End Page 68] peninsula respectively — as shining examples of a fluid and equitable trade economy. Bartram’s account of the region surrounding these towns describes a porous, near-fantastical natural landscape of subterranean waterways, crystalline rivers, and flowing trade routes. Moreover, Bartram places some of the book’s most jubilant scenes of Anglo-Indian friendship, sympathetic affiliation, and mutually-beneficial exchange against this Gulf backdrop. Bartram’s Gulf therefore provides a theoretical...

Shaken Spirits: Cherokees, Moravian Missionaries, and the New Madrid Earthquakes

From December 1811 through March 1812, a series of earthquakes rattled the eastern half of North America. This essay uses Cherokee and Moravian missionary interpretations of the earthquakes as windows into early nineteenth-century ideas about the links between natural and social disorder. It argues that in their mutual search for explanations of the disorder, Moravians and Cherokees came to emphasize their cultural and epistemological differences. Furthermore, as Cherokees gravitated to their own prophets’ calls for ritual and reform, Moravians increasingly seized on apocalyptic understandings of the tremors, disguising their concerns under a front of dismissal of Cherokee explanations. For the Cherokees, contemporary concerns, grounded in long-standing beliefs about the mechanisms responsible for natural disorder, framed a vigorous debate about how to respond not only to the earthquakes but to major geopolitical and cultural transformations. Cherokees embedded their debates within their efforts to check United States expansionism and determine the utility of white people and their goods in Cherokee country. Amid internal problems in mission governance and a lack of Cherokee receptiveness to their evangelism, Moravians grew uncertain about the tremors’ meaning over time. As the earth continued shaking, they began to ponder whether the end of the world was soon at hand. They masked their private fears about both the meaning of the earthquakes and the status of their mission by denouncing Cherokee prophets. Struggling to interpret the same disturbing phenomenon in mutually troubling times, Cherokees and Moravians rejected one another’s earthquake explanations and prescriptions for the future.

The Payne-Butrick Papers (review)

The Payne-Butrick Papers. Edited and annotated by William L. Anderson, Jane L. Brown, and Anne F. Rogers. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 2 vols. Pp. xxx + 363, viii + 561. Cloth, $150.00.)Reviewed by Daniel K. RichterThese two handsome books bring into print the contents of six manuscript volumes from the Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago. How those many pages of ethnographic material on Cherokee people during the removal era came into the possession of turn-of-the-twentieth-century collector Ayer is unclear. But they are what survives of an extraordinary effort to document the Cherokees in the 1830s and 1840s undertaken by John Howard Payne, a New Englander perhaps best known as the man responsible for the lyrics of Home Sweet Home.After a modest international career as an actor and an undistinguished stint as ajournalist, and before being appointed as U.S. counsel to Tunis, Payne found himself almost by accident in Cherokee country as a guest of Chief John Ross in 1835. What began with a journalistic interest in Native American resistance to Federal and state removal policies became personal when Georgia troops crossed not only into Cherokee Nation territory but across the line into the state of Tennessee to arrest Payne and Ross on trumped-up charges of obstructing a census. Payne also stood accused of being an abolitionist and a French spy. After his release from imprisonment, Payne made it his business to publicize nationally the illegality of his arrest and the treatment of the Cherokees more generally, particularly in the Treaty of New Echota, which provided the legal basis for removal. Payne spent a few weeks in Cherokee country before his arrest in 1835, four months in Indian Territory after removal in 1840 and 1841, and some additional time with Cherokees in 1842. On that last occasion, he was employed by the U.S. government to investigate the results of the New Echota Treaty; his honest report got him fired.Along the way, Payne not only became deeply interested in Cherokee history and religion but met a man who probably knew those subjects more thoroughly than any other Euro-American. Presbyterian missionary Daniel Butrick lived with Cherokees for more than thirty years, from his arrival at the Brainerd Mission in Tennessee 1818, through the horrors of the Trail of Tears, until his death in what is now Oklahoma in 1851. The first of the six bound volumes at the Newberry is the result of Payne's collaboration with Butrick, a polished but never published manuscript of what Payne hoped would be the first of three books. An overview of Cherokee religious beliefs and ceremonies, the text is heavily - at times nearly fatally - infused with Payne's and Butrick's then common-place theory that Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The third Newberry manuscript appears to be a rough draft of one of the subsequent books Payne envisioned. These compilations are valuable not only for the many nuggets of Cherokee traditions that peek through the interpretive scheme but because they attribute particular stories and pieces of information to individual Cherokee informants, and thus allow glimpses of distinct persons and perspectives.But in many ways the remaining manuscripts - which in this edition occupy the middle of volume 1 and all of volume 2 - are far more interesting. The second Newberry manuscript consists of miscellaneous notes that Payne compiled during his visits to the Cherokees. Sprinkled through lists of clans' and chiefs' names, transcriptions of laws and magazine articles, and other bits of information are biographical sketches of such well-known figures as Ross, Shoe Boots, and Sequoyah; notes on interviews with Native leaders; and accounts of the machinations of U.S. officials. Manuscript four, which opens volume 2 of the printed collection, consists of letters written to Payne about the Cherokees. …

Missed Opportunities and the Problem of Mohawk Chief John Norton's Cherokee Ancestry

John Norton (1770–1831?) was one of the most important Iroquois leaders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the author of a thousand-page manuscript on First Nations history, a journey he made to the Cherokee country, and his adventures in the War of 1812. However, that text and his other writings have received comparatively little attention from scholars despite the rich opportunities these documents hold for exploring the indigenous world of his day. Much of the neglect stems from a reluctance to accept him as a “real” native person because he was born in Scotland and was an adopted Mohawk and because people have doubted his claim that his father was a Cherokee. This article clarifies Norton's claim to a Cherokee connection and concludes that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the probability that his father was a Cherokee; thus it invites scholars to look at Norton's work anew in their quest to understand the First Nations world of the latter 1700s and early 1800s.

Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America (review)

Reviewed by: Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America Owen Stanwood Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America. Edited by A. G. Roeber. [ Max Kade German-American Research Institute Series.] (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2008. Pp. xxiv, 216. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-271-03346-4.) For decades, North American mission history has focused on two groups: Jesuits in New France, whom historians admire for their cultural adaptability and relative successes; and New England Puritans, who usually come off as spectacular failures for their cultural chauvinism and lack of effort. During the past decade, meanwhile, a third group has entered the picture that upsets this contrast of successful Catholics and unsuccessful Protestants. During the 1700s the Unitas Fratrum, better known as the Moravians, operated missions in the Pennsylvania backcountry, the southern mainland colonies, and the [End Page 871]Danish West Indies. Several scholars have produced impressive monographs on these missions, but this volume—which originated from a 2004 conference at Pennsylvania State University—is the first to place the Moravians in comparative perspective. The conference that inspired this book marked the publication of the diaries of the missionary David Zeisberger, and as a result, many of the essays concern Zeisberger or the Pennsylvania and Ohio missions in general. Although the chapters vary in both quality and purpose, they tend to describe Moravians much as previous historians have portrayed Jesuits: as intrepid and adaptable backcountry operators who used innovative methods to win Indian converts. R. David Edmunds sets the tone in the first essay, a biographical sketch of the Delaware war chief Isaac Glikhikan, claiming that unlike most natives, this student of Zeisberger became a genuine convert. Other essays focus on Moravian sources, explaining how they contribute to an understanding of Delaware ethnography—another echo of scholars' past enthusiasm for the Jesuit Relations. The best essay, by Walter W. Woodward, focuses on the medium of song as a tool of intercultural communication, explaining how Moravians and native proselytes shared an aural culture that allowed missionaries to communicate difficult concepts. The chapter is fascinating in that it manages, unlike any of the others, to offer a rationale for the Moravians' successes. These Germans were different from both Catholics and Calvinists in that their expressions of faith focused less on ritual or the word and more on sound, which suited Algonquians well. The smaller number of articles on Catholic missions, meanwhile, tends to revise and question the Jesuits' previous status as exceptional missionaries. In a suggestive but short chapter, Dominique Deslandres argues that seventeenth-century Jesuits were functionally incapable of identifying with natives, while Luca Codignola's contribution draws from an impressive range of sources in the Vatican Archives and elsewhere to claim that Catholic missionaries seldom felt any sympathy with the Indians—even if their superiors in Rome occasionally did. Finally, Christopher J. Bilodeau's fascinating portrait of Wabanaki mission towns in New France focuses on Jesuit attempts to police Indian behavior. The essay uses familiar sources from the Jesuit Relationsquietly to counter the traditional portrait of the adaptable Jesuit. Bilodeau's protagonist, Jacques Bigot, lives up to his name. He showed little inclination to compromise with the Wabanaki on moral or cultural matters, even as the Indians themselves constructed their own version of Catholicism that often diverged from priestly instruction. The volume contains many fascinating essays, but taken together, they raise more questions than they answer. Aside from Anthony G. Roeber's introduction, none of the authors attempts any comparative analysis, and some of the essays read as conference papers barely expanded or revised to suit the purposes of the volume. In addition, the range of topics is a bit mystifying. The volume purports to compare missionary endeavors in the mid-Atlantic [End Page 872]region, but some of the essays range as far as New France and Cherokee Country. Also, the decision to include Moravians and Catholics—who rarely interacted with each other and did not work with the same native groups—is never really explained, nor is the related decision to exclude most other Protestant missionary groups like the Puritans. In sum, this is an...

Shaking off the Trammels of the World

Shaking off the Trammels of the World Sam Pickering (bio) The Warrior’s Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route by Casey Clabough (University of Tennessee Press, 2007. xii + 188 pages. Illustrated. $24.95 pb) The Warrior’s Path describes Casey Clabough’s walking 450 miles from Frederick County, Maryland, to [End Page lxvii] Gatlinburg, Tennessee. He followed the Athowominee, this being an Iroquois word for the route taken by Indians traveling from New York down into the Cherokee country of Tennessee and North Georgia. Clabough’s German ancestors emigrated from Bavaria to Pennsylvania in the 1730s. At the end of the eighteenth century they resettled, following the path from western Maryland to the Smoky Mountains. In his book Clabough attempts to trace his ancestors’ way south. To do so he walks along roads, making his journey very different from a trek along the Appalachian Trail. Hiking the Appalachian Trail is comparatively romantic, a Thoreauvian endeavor that tests one’s mettle and proves the self. Clabough’s trip smacks more of ordeal. Strangers follow him. Fumes from highways are stifling. He is almost hit by a dump truck. In Virginia a yokel in a red pickup throws a can of Coors Light at him, smacking his backpack just below his neck. Near Kingsport, Tennessee, a driver holding a semiautomatic pistol tries to rob him. Clabough has no money, only road-weary clothes, and, after looking at him, the driver speeds off, exclaiming, “nasty motherfucker.” In great part The Warrior’s Path provides the occasion for meditation, and the narrative slips easily between past and present. As Clabough walks forward in space, he often travels back in time, describing, for example, conflicts between settlers and Indians, the travails of indentured servants, and the customs of German settlers. Facts abound and like wild berries add zest to paragraphs: Radford Gatlin, whose name lingers in the town, was the only man out of 1,303 men in Sevier County to vote for secession; Conestoga wagons were an innovation of the Pennsylvania Dutch: “The fact that American steering systems are on the left side of the automobiles of our own time,” Clabough writes, “stems from the location of the wagon’s driver seat, which was just to the inside of the left front wheel.” He also describes ways of coping with the long walk. To keep mosquitoes away he eats garlic and rubs cross sections of cloves on his skin. Digressions come more naturally when a walker has a destination, especially when he travels alone. “I want,” Hazlitt writes in “On Going a Journey,” “to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze and not to have them entitled in the briars and thorns of controversy.” Clabough seeds his pages with quotations and then lets his thoughts float. For example, in pondering history, he quotes Paul Valéry: “History is the most dangerous concoction the chemistry of the mind has produced. Its properties are well known. It sets people dreaming, intoxicates them, engenders false memories, exaggerates their reflexes, keeps old wounds open, torments their leisure, inspires them with megalomania or persecution complex, and makes nations bitter, proud, insufferable, and vain. History can justify anything you like. It teaches nothing, for it contains and gives examples of everything.” Hazlitt also writes that the “soul of a journey was liberty, perfect liberty to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go on a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all consequences; to leave ourselves behind, [End Page lxviii] much more to get rid of others.” “Oh, it is great,” he continues, “to shake off the trammels of the world, and of public opinion—to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity.” In part Clabough loses himself in the search for his past, something common to many travelers. In pondering the past he escapes the amorphous tempestuous present. History is so fragmented and fragile that people never know much about their collective yesterdays. They know so little about the past that it is intellectually manageable and thus appealing, sometimes comforting—even accounts of butchery. Because history exists within margins on the page, it does not dislocate and...

Ceremonies of the Damned by Adrian C. Louis

Book Review s 471 indicated in the book’s subtitle— witchcraft and sorcery (by no means precisely the same things, according to Kilpatrick)— the incantations are grouped in four categories: divinatory prayers, protective charms, serious conjuring spells, and purification rites. Since order in the Cherokee cosmos is to be maintained at all costs, and the two means for sustaining it— balance and purification— are to be practiced as needed on a continual basis, knowledge of how to deal with such potentially disruptive forces as witchcraft and sorcery must be made available to the traditional Cherokee. ldi:gawe:sdi, such as these translated and explicated by Kilpatrick, serve to illustrate to an incredibly complex degree how order is maintained in the Cherokee worldview. Titles of such incantations as rendered into English— for example, “To Divine with the Stones,” “To Placate the Angry,” “To Compel an Enemy to Forget,” “To Fix Tobacco for Use at Night to Repel Evil Ones,” “To Destroy an Enemy,” and “Going to the Water”— express the four categories in which a traditional Cherokee, with the assistance of a dida:hnvuii:sgi, can recognize evil and meanness in the form of witchery or sorcery, seek to neutralize it, and then, if successful up to this point, proceed to necessary acts of purification in order to restore the cosmos to fullness and balance. The Night Has a Naked Soul is a much-welcomed addition to Cherokee cultural studies in particular, and to Native American literature in general, and I most enthusiastically commend it to all serious students of our cultures and literatures. A word, though, from one homeboy to another: Alan, come back to Cherokee country in Oklahoma more often so that you can remember that it is Mayes County (not Hayes, as is given twice in the text), a county in the Cherokee Nation named after Joel Mayes, a turn-of-the-century Cherokee chief. Ceremonies of the Dam ned. By Adrian C. Louis. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1997. 80 pages, $10.00. Reviewed by W illiam John Pollett Utah State University, Logan Ceremonies of the Damned is a powerful collection of poems by Adrian C. Louis that portrays a gamut of Native American social, political, and personal issues. Louis has a stance, tone, and style that could be considered harsh, offensive, or realistic, but his ability to provoke meaning and awareness through poetic imagery is a wellhoned skill. He weaves with symbolism and attacks with truth. Pure rage and agony are his tools, while reflection and commentary are qualities that seem to originate from a dream world. The text is orga­ nized into a triptych where the first two sections, “Petroglyphs of 472 WAL 34.4 WINTER 2 0 0 0 Serena” and “Earth Bone Connected to the Spirit Bone,” are com­ plete poems in and of themselves. The third section is a series of poems entitled “This Never-Ending Farewell” that brings all three sections and the title poem, “Ceremonies of the Damned,” full circle with overlapping themes. Louis begins the ceremonies with Serena: “Dark Serena with her broken English. Wild-ass Serena and our Indian dance / of selfdestruction ” (4). Each stanza becomes a vignette telling of sharp truths, showing the remnants of an assimilated culture assembling a new religion, and all the while emphasizing motive and a connection with place. Louis describes with sharp honesty his relationships with his wife and students as well as his yearnings for Serena and the unfathomable. With brutal language and blunt imagery, Louis lassos a widening gyre of American life’s awry destruction, dark lust, and brilliant vision only to unleash them from his deepest holdings. He reaches toward a commentary of American life and ties it all together in the section “Earth Bone Connected to the Spirit Bone.” The identity of self is connected through personal relation­ ships between the poet, the poem, and the eternal. Icons, rituals, and devices from lost and popular culture organize Louis’s percep­ tion of historical happenstance. Rhythms that parallel everything from child’s play to war chants describe the torment of innocence versus decay. Like a prayer for life, “Earth Bone Connected to the Spirit Bone” exposes the hardships and...

Cherokees in Transition: A Study of Changing Culture and Environment Prior to 1775

Journal Article Cherokees in Transition: A Study of Changing Culture and Environment Prior to 1775 and Occupying the Cherokee Country of Oklahoma Get access Cherokees in Transition: A Study of Changing Culture and Environment Prior to 1775. By Goodwin Gary G.. (Chicago: Department of Geography, University of Chicago, 1977. ix, 207 p. Maps, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography. $6.00, paper.)Occupying the Cherokee Country of Oklahoma. By Hewes Leslie. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. 77 p. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes. Paper.) Gerard Reed Gerard Reed Mid-America Nazarene College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 10, Issue 2, April 1979, Pages 218–219, https://doi.org/10.2307/968024 Published: 01 April 1979

Opinion 447 Rejection for nomenclatorial purposes of the original edition published at Philadelphia in 1791 and of the editions published in London and Dublin respectively in 1792 of the work by William Bartram entitled "Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, east and west Florida, the Cherokee country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges or Creek confederacy, and the country

Opinion 447 Rejection for nomenclatorial purposes of the original edition published at Philadelphia in 1791 and of the editions published in London and Dublin respectively in 1792 of the work by William Bartram entitled "Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, east and west Florida, the Cherokee country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges or Creek confederacy, and the country

Cultural Fault Line in the Cherokee Country

(1943). Cultural Fault Line in the Cherokee Country. Economic Geography: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 136-142.

Indian Land in the Cherokee Country of Oklahoma

the former Indian Territory in what is now eastern Oklahoma is the existence of a large amount of Indianowned land, much of which is restricted against sale and is tax-exempt. In the Cherokee Country there is much Indian land. It has seemed pertinent to inquire into the extent, quality, and use of such land, with the purpose of evaluating the broad significance of Indian land. Emphasis will be given land in the eastern, wooded, or Ozarkian portion of the former Cherokee Nation (Figure 1), which served as culture hearth for the Cherokees in Oklahoma, and is still the home of the majority.