Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips Page B

“civilize” the Cherokee, and in the first decades of the 1800s the native people of north Georgia were still hoping to live in peace with their new white neighbors. Around 1809, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah began developing the first written alphabet for his people’s language, and by the 1820s the Cherokee settlements in northwestern Georgia included Cherokee-built schoolhouses, Cherokee-owned sawmills and blacksmith shops, and vibrant cultural institutions like a tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix . Hollywood may have filled whiteimaginations with visions of Indians living in tepees and hunting with bows and arrows, but by the late 1820s many Cherokee people in the Georgia foothills had lived alongside their white neighbors for years and were part of a racially diverse and increasingly integrated frontier community.
    When gold was discovered at Dahlonega in 1828, however, it created a renewed push into the Cherokee Territory. Benjamin Parks, said to have found the very first gold nugget while out deer hunting, told the Atlanta Constitution that “once news got abroad” that there was gold in the Georgia hills,
there was such excitement as you never saw. It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from every state. . . . They came afoot, on horseback and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else.
    Even as they tried to tolerate all these encroachments into the Territory, the Cherokee were disenfranchised in the courts, and they had no legal recourse even when whites stole from them in broad daylight. As the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix put it in 1829,
Our [white] neighbors who regard no law, or pay no respect to the laws of humanity, are now reaping a plentiful harvest by the law of Georgia, which declares that no Indian shall be a party in any court created by the laws or constitution of that state. These neighbors come over the line [between Georgia and the Territory], and take the cattle belonging to the Cherokees. The Cherokees go in pursuit of their property, but all that they can effect is, to see their cattle snugly kept in the lots of these robbers. We are an abused people. [Even] if we can receive no redress, we can feel deeply the injustice done to our rights.
    White prospectors soon moved from rustling cattle to stealing whole Cherokee farms—emboldened by the fact that bogus claims could receive an official stamp of approval from state land agents. After the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Georgia officials began planning for the future of the Cherokee Territory, anticipating a day when government troops would force all native people west of the Mississippi. In 1832, two land lotteries were held to redistribute former Cherokee lands to Georgia’s white settlers.
    In theory, those who drew land lots were allowed to take possession only if the property was unoccupied, but in reality, countless whites interpreted their winning tickets as a license to drive off Cherokee residents, including many who owned prosperous farms. In May of 1833, the editors of the Phoenix told how
an industrious Indian had by his steady habits improved his premises to be of considerable value, when it was drawn by one of the lottery gamblers in Georgia. The fortunate holder of the ticket applied to the governor for a [land] grant, which was given him on his assurance that there was no Indian occupant on it. The fortunate drawer . . . loaded his pistols, entered the possession of Ootawlunsta, pointing one [pistol] at him, and drove the innocent Cherokee from his well-cultivated field. . . . The Cherokee are doomed to suffer.
    With such white “pioneers” growing more and more bold, and with Georgia officials unwilling to comply with two separate Supreme Court decisions upholding the Cherokee people’s rights as a sovereign nation, the stage was set for the Treaty of New Echota. Signed in 1835 by a small faction of the Cherokee—and against the