[Why our area has its unique political and religious attitudes.]

Where have all the Cherokees gone?

For several articles we have looked at the almost constant movement of Native Americans before their forced settlement to Indian Territory about 1838. When looking through the telescope of history, we tend to think the world and people were uniformly similar. Like other families, differences of opinion on relations with the government, neighbors, and lifestyle created conflict.

The Old Natchez Trace from Nashville, now Tennessee to Natchez, now Mississippi, was a Native American trail which followed the old buffalo migration paths, long before the first Europeans ventured on the continent. Building of the Augusta to Nashville Road, also called the Georgia Road, from 1799-1804 completed an overland route for travel from east of the Appalachians, even if it made a long jaunt north to get over the mountains.

The equivalent waterway runs along the western flank of the Great Smoky Mountains down the Tennessee River southwest to Alabama then back north across Tennessee and Kentucky to the Ohio River, then west down the Ohio before heading south down the Mississippi.

By 1790, the fledgling United States controlled all land east of the Mississippi and north of Florida. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase gave them lands all the way to the Rockies. It was heady times for the really limited number of English-speaking Americans to move.

The Appalachian Mountains had kept most new Americans in the former colonies along the Atlantic Ocean. The Georgia Road passed directly through Chickamauga (Chattanooga), giving settlers access to the remaining Cherokee lands. Conversely, the trails gave a way for the dissatisfied Native Americans to migrate great distances.

The Chickamauga had aligned with the British during the Revolutionary War. Their struggle against the United States finally ended in 1794. Most recently we followed the young troublemakers who escaped their deadly rendezvous to Arkansas in 1794 to become the first of the Old Settlers.

If things were not difficult enough, the 1798 Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse, ceded more lands, causing more to leave their former home. We have seen that a number of Native Americans had been pushed from Virginia and the Bertie District in the north part of North Carolina to the Drowning Creek region in the south part of North Carolina and lapping over into South Carolina. These included Cheraw, Catawba, Pamunkey, Chowan, and other small groups.

A group led by Jeremiah Bass left North Carolina to join the Cherokee in Tennessee in 1795. By 1799, they had entered the Choctaw area near Wilkinson, now Mississippi. They physically were across the national boundary in the Spanish West Florida parish of Louisiana. After the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803 they moved to Bayou Chicot, in the Opelousas District of Louisiana, where a son was born in 1804.

Another group led by Ephraim and Gilbert Sweat, who was born in Tennessee, left the North-South Carolina region in 1800 and were in the same Opelousas District before 1806. In their group was Joshua Perkins among others. A third group, led by Thomas Nash left Chowan, North Carolina, lived in Tennessee, then Natchez, Mississippi by 1804, before crossing to Opelousas.

These groups began moving up the Red River to Natchitoches district by 1806. These Native Americans made up the first non-French pioneers to Louisiana, before it was a state. Why is that significant? They had Cherokee friends and family come down the Red River to visit at the Natchitoches trading post in 1808.

How did that merger come about?

At the same time as groups were going south, other small groups of Native Americans were moving across the Mississippi into Arkansas along the St. Frances and Arkansas River.

A small contingent had left the St. Frances River in Arkansas headed southwest to Spanish Tejas. They created a small village in Miller County, a contested area of Indian Territory, Arkansas Territory, and Tejas. The location was along the Red River near the Great Spanish Road along the mining route between Natchitoches and Santa Fe. This is where the French explorer LaHarpe in 1719 had begun his cross-country trek to meet the Caddo Indians on the Arkansas River near present day Tulsa.

In 1807, Pascagoula Native American Chief Pinaye visited Nacogdoches in Spanish Tejas, requesting permission to settle villages of Pascagoula, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Shawnee Indians in the area. The request was approved on 4 Sep 1807. Recall Nacogdoches is on El Camino Real, formerly the Indian Southwestern Trail, from Natchitoches to San Antonio.

They were a conflicted entity. While Native Americans, many had white heritage usually fathers. They were native born in the US, but treated worse than emigrants and slaves. They kept moving just to live.

What has just happened? Twenty years before Indian territory and thirty years before the forced removal, Cherokee with other Native Americans were escaping from the US control and settling in a region of the Red River southwest of Idabel, the center of western civilization at Natchitoches, and the center of Spanish Tejas at Nacogdoches. They independently moved to the area, but remained in communication across international boundaries.

Since foot and horse was the only method of travel cross-country, we tend to think of the people as sedentary. As we see, they travelled extensively, and kept in communications with others.

Think about the movement of people. Why endure such hardship, relocation, and losing all you have known? To them, freedom to practice their life was better than subservience. Do we hear the same beckoning today?

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Excerpts from our book:

No Man’s Land Pioneers, Louisiana’s Wild, Wild West, ISBN: 9781694632128.