Cherokee History

Elijah Clark should be remembered as an important frontier leader during the American Revolution in Georgia and South Carolina, and in establishing the peace afterwards. Born in 1742, likely in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, he was the son of ambitious backcountry settler John Clark (1689-1764), although their genealogy remains murky. This article updates the piece that was published in the Journal of the American Revolution.

This study investigates the multifaceted and frequently underexamined participation of Native American nations in the American Civil War, a subject that—despite increased scholarly attention—remains marginal within mainstream historical discourse. Employing a comprehensive analysis of political motivations, internal tribal divisions, military alliances, and postwar consequences, the research elucidates the ways in which Indigenous communities engaged with the broader national conflict as part of their ongoing struggle to safeguard sovereignty, territorial integrity, and cultural continuity. Drawing on an extensive range of primary sources, including treaties, correspondence, military records, and oral histories, the study examines the strategic alignments forged with both the Union and the Confederacy by tribes such as the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, situating these decisions within broader contexts of historical grievance, economic necessity, and pragmatic survival.
The analysis foregrounds the leadership and agency of figures such as Stand Watie and Opothleyahola, whose divergent wartime strategies encapsulated the internal complexities of Native political life. Their actions reflect not only the contested nature of allegiance within Indigenous nations but also the adaptability and resilience with which Native leaders navigated competing imperial powers. By interrogating these internal dynamics, the study challenges simplistic portrayals of Native involvement as monolithic or peripheral, instead situating Indigenous actors as central participants in a conflict that reshaped the geopolitical landscape of North America.
In addressing the postwar period, the research critically engages with the patterns of dispossession, treaty violations, and intensified federal oversight that followed Native participation in the war. These outcomes underscore the paradox of Indigenous wartime engagement: substantial contributions to the military and political theaters were met with systemic betrayal and the erosion of self-determination. By centering Indigenous perspectives, this work contributes to a decolonial historiography that reframes the Civil War as a transformative event in Native American history—one that profoundly influenced questions of sovereignty, identity, and survival well into the modern era.

Investigating the origins of a well-known but rarely identified myth that has fooled many historians over the last 80 years. Unwittingly referenced and cited innumerable times by historians, scholars, and academics, this myth has replaced fact with fallacy, in the history of an event most deserving of genuine truth.

I convey gratitude to the Native researchers who have become before me, those who contributed to changes in perceptions to more positive ones, and those who catalogued the often difficult and painful stories of our ancestors. My friends at OSU, whom I have long referred to as my PhD buddies, have provided ongoing support without which I would not have finished this project. Thank you to Kelli Carney, Sherri Been, Valarie Farrow, LaKrisa Walker, and others who have been there for suggestions, as sounding boards, and for the occasional kick in the butt when needed. I also appreciate Oklahoma State University for providing me with a summer fellowship, assisting me so that I could make one last trip to North Carolina for data collection and allowing me time to focus on this project. While many other friends have been supportive, and I thank them, I would like to express my particular gratitude to Rita Bunch, who was my wonderful boss during much of the doctoral journey, and Sherry Holcomb, my friend upon whom I could always depend to answer any questions related to Cherokee language or tradition. My colleagues with whom I now work have also provided much-needed support and encouragement; I am fortunate to work with such amazing and dedicated educators. Although there are many more whom I should show appreciation, I conclude with my family. My husband, Brian, has been incredibly patient throughout this lengthy process, and my kids, Cassandra, Alysa, and Colton, did not give up on me. My mother expressed her pride and support for what I was doing. I love and appreciate them all, as v Acknowledgements reflect the views of the author and are not endorsed by committee members or Oklahoma State University. well as my many other family members, both via blood and via marriage, who have supported me throughout my educational odyssey.

the Southeastern Tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries played-off the British colonies (North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) against the French colony in Louisiana and the Spanish colony of La Florida (Florida today). Although the Choctaw and Chickasaw were culturally and linguistically related, the Choctaw became allied with the French, and the Chickasaw with the British. While originally the trade with the English was in deerskins, when the deer were depleted, the Chickasaw turned to capturing  other Indians, who then were sold as slaves to be exported by the English in South Carolina to the West Indies. Both the Creek and the Cherokee traded with the English, but the Creek and Cherokee were enemies of each other. Both the French and the English tried to realign these tribes, but the tribes played one against the other.

The situation was complicated by the fact that escaped African-American slaves and Creek took refuge in Spanish Florida, where they coalesced into the Seminole tribe. Governor George Oglethorpe of Georgia attempted to enlist Chickasaw in his attacks against the Spaniards in Florida. The play-off between these tribes and the French ended in 1763, when France ceded the land east of the Mississippi River to England. But after the American Revolution, the trade-off between the Southeastern Tribes, the Spaniards, and the United States continued into the first half of the nineteenth century.

“Who served as a Soldier in the Western Army, in the Massachusetts Line, in the Expedition under General HARMAR, and the unfortunate General St. CLAIR. Containing An Account of his CAPTIVITY, SUFFERINGS, and ESCAPE from the KICKAPOO INDIANS. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF, And published at the earnest Importunity of his Friends, for the benefit of AMERICAN YOUTH.”

Samuel Mason’s life reflects the violent, shifting loyalties of early America. Born in 1739, he served under George Washington but quickly gained a reputation as a thief, counterfeiter, and river pirate. From frontier forts to the outlaw stronghold of Cave-In-Rock, Mason led a gang that terrorized travelers along the Mississippi River and Natchez Trace. Once a justice of the peace, he died in disgrace—his severed head returned for bounty. From Soldier to Scoundrel traces Mason’s descent into infamy and examines how blurred the line between patriot and predator could be in the lawless American frontier.

The Private John G. Burnett letter1 has long been considered one of the primary source2 documents related to eyewitness experience of the Trail of Tears. The Letter memorializes the experiences of a Soldier who accompanied the Cherokee across country on the Trail of Tears. It is arguably the most quoted and referenced document related to the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee Removal. Shockingly, the document has been proven to be a fabricated artifact, containing fictitious stories, which, while being widely cited in many academic works, has avoided academic scrutiny for over one hundred years. Three questions arise. First: What evidence supports the claim that the Burnett Letter and its contents are a hoax? Second: How has this Hoax survived and thrived for so many years? Third: If the information truly is fiction and lies, what misinformation, flawed historical narrative, and historically harmful consequences have resulted from the wide dissemination of these lies? Transcripts of the Burnett Letter Note: The entire letter is fourteen pages and often excerpted or truncated. Several sources of complete Letter are: • Museum of the Cherokee People website-see digital scan and read the actual artifact.

In March and April of 1825 General LaFayette , "the Nation's Guest" journeyed through the Creek Nation as he traveled from Georgia to Alabama. In 1825 the Creek Nation was still an independent nation. How would the Creek leaders respond to a former enemy? Would he be welcomed or would be shunned? Surprisingly the entire Creek Nation enthusiastically welcomed and honored the man they referred to as, "The Favorite Father" and "The French Captain."  They respected him because he clearly believed in equal rights for all.

This article examines Native American political strategies that were leveraged in the design, construction, and eventual preservation of the mid-nineteenth-century civic architectures of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Predating a turn toward the “politics of recognition,” these architectures advanced what could be described as “cultural misrecognition,” as they presented an appearance of assimilation to U.S. cultural and political norms while nonetheless supporting the Five Tribes’ resistance to one of the most fundamental operations of U.S. governance: the treatment of land as a privately owned exploitable resource. In the absence of detailed historical records attesting to the architectural choices made by the Five Tribes’ leaders, this article reads architecture through the political histories of the Five Tribes in order to understand how these buildings served the nations in their struggles to maintain sovereignty.

Alabama is the home of numerous forts or fortified sites that were established in the early 1800s. Larger forts typically served as a warning of the American military might to the resident Indian tribes and served as a source of protection for white settlers in the region. Smaller outposts were often established as supply depots with a limited number of troops garrisoned there. The locations of many of these once strategic sites are largely forgotten. A few such as Fort Mitchell in Russell County, Fort Toulouse, previously known as Fort Jackson, near Wetumpka, Alabama and Fort Mims near Stockton, Alabama have been preserved as historic sites. Countless others are largely forgotten. Fort Bainbridge is one of those sites that is known by only the most avid of historians. The exact location of the fort is unknown. By the time of General LaFayette's visit to Alabama and the Creek Nation in 1825 the fort had been abandoned, and Fort Bainbridge was no longer known as a military site, instead Fort Bainbridge was known as the location of Kendall Lewis' tavern. This doesn't mean that Fort Bainbridge did not serve a strategic purpose in those early years of conflict between the Creek Nation and the United States Military. Fort Bainbridge's existence may have been brief but the role the site played was significant.

Kudzu, a vine originating in East Asia, is notorious in the South for its invasive nature and destruction of the environment. This article describes the impact of Western European culture on Cherokee culture brought about by sustained exposure to one another. Kudzu is employed as a metaphor to describe the destructive, invasive impact of Western European values at the expense of the Cherokee people. The creep of Western European culture upon the Cherokee culture started subtly, but over time and through stealth, Cherokee culture has not only been overtaken but torn apart in a way that was unnoticed until it was too late to fully recover. This essay serves as a warning to not only the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (ECBI) but to Americans in general. The lessons of encroachment by cultural kudzu must be learned and understood by all. In the current state of American society, we are on fertile political ground for the expansion of cultural kudzu. Much like the planting of kudzu, it only takes one cultural seed, dropped in fertile soil, to propel the invasive creep that can infest and destroy other cultures in America.

This is another of the William Johnston collected manuscripts from the Schoolcraft Papers. Although conflating probably a couple centuries worth of conflicts under Saugemau, a powerful leader with great shamanistic powers, Chusco's tale is of tremendous importance for ethnohistorical research. I have added comments, making what connections I can, though probably the tip of the iceberg. His version of war with the Mascouten should be further impetus for seeking Mascouten archeological sites in NW Michigan.

Colonel William Russell, a prominent militia commander, was said to be "dilatory" when preparing his march to relieve Fort Watauga which was under siege by the Cherokee in July, 1776. A thorough analysis of his situation might help explain why he was thought by some to be procrastinating.

In 1887, when Congress passed the General Allotment Act, it authorized the president of the United States to divide the common lands of American Indian tribal nations into private parcels and apportion them to tribal members-a process known as allotment. The law, usually referred to as the Dawes Act, opened a devastating chapter in the history of federal policy toward Native people. The federal government first established allotment agreements with tribes under the provisions of the act, and then it began amending the general policy. The outcome was a calamity. Non-Indians had already seized the bulk of the lands of the continent, but under allotment Native landholdings declined precipitously: from 138 million acres in 1887 to 52 million acres in 1934. Prior to undergoing allotment, each tribal nation determined landholding among members as it saw fit, and tribal members held collective title to their national lands as a whole. This acted as a brake on the sale of tribal lands. By making the remaining tribal lands into private property, allotment made it possible for Native individuals to lose them through direct sales, defaulted mortgages, tax forfeiture sales, and other means. Initially, trust provisions safeguarded allotments from alienation, but soon Congress began to chip away at these protections. Allotment combined the making of land into private property and the taking of that private property from Indians. The resonances with enclosure in early modern England are strong, because both processes involved the breaking up of common lands and their dispossession.

This paper will argue that Grave Houses, sometimes referred to as Spirit Houses, found in various parts of the United States are the result of Indigenous cultural practices. These practices are part of their burial customs and beliefs that existed prior to European contact. The use of Grave Houses traveled with Indigenous people from their homelands to their modern communities in which they live today. There are numerous tribes who share the practice of using Grave Houses; however, this paper will narrow its focus to the history of use by the Cherokee. In doing so, it will give an overview of the region in which the Cherokee lived in the Southeastern United States, their disbursement during the migration of the Old Settlers and forced removal, and their current reservation in Oklahoma. Along with an overview of the settlements and movements of the Cherokee people, a focus will be placed on discussing their burial practices and spiritual belief system as compared to European descendants living in the same regions. In this way, it will establish that Grave Houses found across the Southeastern region are not a European or Appalachian developed practice, but a significant Indigenous one.

Gunlög Fur's A Nation of Women is an ambitious book. It is essentially an overview of Delaware history and cultural change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a gender studies perspective. During this time, the Delaware were commonly referred to as women in diplomatic contexts, and Fur's book attempts to unpack the meanings behind this designation, first by examining the "roles and responsibilities of women" among the Delaware, and the "historical conditions that made such a gendered designation possible." She examines gender both as an "organizing principle for subsistence activities, division of labor and exchange, and dispersion of power" as well as "a process of thought and belief" that "finds sanction in the spiritual realm" (2-3).

The Cherokee Nation has been able to preserve their culture and traditions over the years, even after facing numerous challenges, including displacement, relocation, and assimilation. This research paper seeks to prove the hypothesis that Cherokee Nation's cultural continuity can be traced through the examination of pottery. This study aims to explore the cultural continuity of the Cherokee Nation by analyzing the pottery artifacts found in various archaeological sites. The research will provide a better understanding of the Cherokee Nation's cultural heritage, look for verification of cultural evolution over time, and analysis any perceived evolution or cultural shift by measuring culture changes in a timeline that features carbon-data pottery artifacts associated within a given period in the tribe’s history.

/ RAPHAEL UCHÔA AND SILVIA WAISSE / 0 COMMENTS Formularies, or books of prescriptions, have been in circulation since the very onset of recorded history. A large part of Egyptian papyri and Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform tablets, for example, consist of collections of medical prescriptions. This genre of literature awakened the attention of European scholars, together with the rise of philology in the nineteenth century, to gain momentum starting in the early decades of the following century. To our surprise, during research for another project, we fell upon a study of a formulary that antedates by several decades the earliest known ones. This is noteworthy not only for its temporal precedence but also because this study was carried out in the "New, " rather than in the "Old, " World and within a context entirely foreign to both philology and historical studies. Here, we are referring to James Mooney's The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891). Mooney is merely known in the present time as the rst Westerner to have ever been invited to participate in a peyote ritual. Yet even as such, he is becoming all but forgotten. Among scholars, a timid interest in Mooney awakened together with the recent reappraisal of the overall history of anthropology in the United States. Rather than viewing this period as a complete break between two distinct learning traditions-referred to as "museum anthropology" and the modern discipline as we now recognize it-scholars are increasingly depicting it as a phase of transition and (dis)continuity, spanning from the late nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century (Hinsley 1981; Darnell 2000).

Research that was done on the Revolutionary War battle of Briar (or Brier) Creek, Georgia March 3, 1779. It was reprinted in a report by Daniel Battle and was published as “Civil War in the Midst of Revolution:  Community Divisions and the Battle of Briar Creek, 1779.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 100 (Summer, 2016): 136-159, and "The Revolutionary War Families of the Battle of Briar Creek." Georgia Genealogical Society Quarterly 53 (Winter 2017): 325-336.

This article examines history writing on American Indian education to show its movement from a focus on federal policy to studies that incorporate Native people’s perspectives. The article discusses the benefits and challenges of using oral histories, interviews, and autobiographies for historical analysis and points to the value of a multi‐voiced, interdisciplinary approach.

This article concerns the history of the Cherokees in Northwest Georgia from 1776 to 1829, as found in a series of despositions compiled by General John Coffee of Tennesse in determining the former borders between the Cherokee and Muscogee Native Americans. It was published as “John Coffee’s Search for the Lost History of the Cherokees,” Chattanooga Regional Historical Journal 8 (December 2005): 143-164. Also see "Settlers on the Georgia-Cherokee Frontier, 1829." Georgia Genealogical Society Quarterly 24 (Spring 1988): 25-29.

Cherokee-Anglo-A merican culture contact during the Federal Period in eastern Tennessee is examined. This study attempts to understand the historic outcome of this particular contact situation by looking at the motivating normative beliefs underlying the actions of each culture. Also of interest is the identification of those core qualities of Cherokee culture that enabled survival of contact and extreme acculturation. The Anglo-American culture was divided into two subcultures: the Federal Government and Frontier Settler. Both subcultures possessed distinctive beliefs and exhibited dissimilar patterns of behavior. The Cherokee studied embodied an eastern Tennessee regional subculture that was not necessarily reflective of the overall Cherokee ethnic and cultural group. Analysis was oriented toward defining and discussing normative beliefs, behavior patterns, and patterns of material culture. Such analysis required both ethnohistoric and archaeological data bases. A structured set of questions was used to analyze historic documents in the collection of the Records of the Cherokee Indian Agency in Tennessee, 1801-1835. Proceeding with this analytic format, inferences of normative beliefs were made and patterns of behavior defined. Analysis of archaeological remains representing the Cherokee, Federal Government, and Frontier Settler subcultures required the formulation of a quantitative classification scheme capable of vi vii incorporating both Native American and Euroamerican material elements. Quantitative artifact patterns were formulated for each subculture and then statistically tested to ascertain the degree to which they were related. This method also measured the degree of Cherokee material acculturation and gave insight into the frontier economic system. Once normative beliefs, behavior patterns, and patterns of material culture were defined, the relationship of these categories within each culture was examined. One research objective was to understand the effect of normative beliefs on material culture and determine how the beliefs may be revealed by the archaeological record. The dynamic interaction between the Cherokee and Anglo-Americans was analyzed from the perspective of the process of directed culture contact. Conditions characteristic of directed contact are defined and illustrated from the ethnohistoric and archaeological data.

Gunlög Fur's A Nation of Women is an ambitious book. It is essentially an overview of Delaware history and cultural change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a gender studies perspective. During this time, the Delaware were commonly referred to as women in diplomatic contexts, and Fur's book attempts to unpack the meanings behind this designation, first by examining the "roles and responsibilities of women" among the Delaware, and the "historical conditions that made such a gendered designation possible." She examines gender both as an "organizing principle for subsistence activities, division of labor and exchange, and dispersion of power" as well as "a process of thought and belief" that "finds sanction in the spiritual realm" (2-3).

welcomes you to the 75 th annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers (SEDAAG)! The conference will take place from November 22-23, 2020 1 at the Marriott Shoals Hotel and Spa (which you can see, with its distinctive Renaissance Tower, on the left of the cover photo), and will be hosted by the Department of Geography at the University of North Alabama. Florence is located on the Tennessee River in the far northwest corner of Alabama, and together with the three neighboring cities of Tuscumbia, Sheffield, and Muscle Shoals, it comprises the Shoals Region, also known as the Muscle Shoals Region or the Quad Cities. The combined population of these four cities is about 80,000. Muscle Shoals has a small airport with commercial propeller plane service from Atlanta, but most locals fly in and out of Huntsville, which is about one hour away. Nashville and Birmingham airports are both about two hours away. Evidence of Native American inhabitation of the region goes back to at least 500 BCE, when the Florence Indian Mound, also known as Wawamanona, was constructed (Steen n.d.). The mound is still standing and can be visited along with the Florence Indian Mound Museum. Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Yuchi were among the Indigenous Peoples of the region. Many were removed to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears from 1830-50, but many remained, and some have returned. The Wall, built by Tom Hendrix as a memorial to his Yuchi great-great grandmother, Te-lah-ney, commemorates her harrowing and arduous return home from exile. A hand-built rock wall, it is the largest monument to a Native American woman, and can be visited on a short trip outside Florence. The city of Florence was founded in 1818 and served as the transshipment point for traffic between the upper and lower parts of the Tennessee River. The Muscle Shoals were an obstacle to river traffic, a problem ultimately solved in the early twentieth century by the construction of Wilson Dam (1918-24), which raised the water level and replaced an earlier, less successful canal detour (Davidson 1946). Wilson Dam (which you can see on the right of the cover photo), the first of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dams, also provides hydropower and attracted the aluminum processing industry to the area. Today Lauderdale County, where Florence is located, and neighboring Colbert County, have both an agricultural (corn, cotton, soybeans, chickens) base as well as an industrial one. During and preceding the Civil War, Florence was a temporary home to Dred Scott, Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Bell Hood, and William T. Sherman, who used the current Geography building, Wesleyan Hall (built in 1855, Figure 1), as his headquarters, and his journals written there contain the famous phrase "War is hell" (McDonald 1991).

I would like to thank my committee for their support and suggestions during the writing of my dissertation. As a student, I had the good fortune of taking seminars with each member beginning with my first graduate class at LSU. Mark Thompson became director late in the course of the project and generously agreed to chair the committee during the last semester. Dr. Thompson provided sage advice and helped keep me on task with chapter submissions. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Diane Mac Donald and the late John Mac Donald. During my childhood, our family vacation destinations read like a roll call of famous historical places in the northeast. From the Freedom Trail in Boston to Colonial Williamsburg, our summer adventures aboard the station wagon encouraged my curiosity. Somewhere in between my car ride lectures about the Yorktown campaign and scene setting talks on Cemetery Ridge, they must have realized they created a monster. My wife Anna Tapia endured long months of rarely seeing her husband emerge from his cabinet with the exception of taking meals. Her perceptive inquiries about Rutherford's life helped me clarify points throughout the dissertation. Anna's steadfast patience and sense of humor helps create an oasis of sanity in our home.

Most of these sources ignore or are weak in their coverage of the Southern Campaign. None of these books identify any spy for the Americans with a rank higher than Major, while Williamson was a Brigadier General in the South Carolina militia, before his defection. A note on terminology: an agent is spying on side A for side B. A double agent is pretending to spy on side A for side B, but is really working for side A. A triple agent is working for three intelligence services, but is loyal to only one. Williamson qualifies as a double agent working for the Americans, because for a Journal of Backcountry Studies 2 Williamson's beloved plantation of White Hall was equally important-and also little studied. Located near Fort Ninety Six in what is now Greenwood County in upstate South Carolina, before the Revolution White Hall was one of the only major plantations in the region. During the Revolution, it served as Williamson's military headquarters, and at various times was a fort, prison and arms depot. On 5 December 1781 a battle between Patriot and Loyalist forces was fought at White Hall, resulting in a Loyalist victory. Surprisingly, all trace of this extensive and historic activity has now disappeared. For example, it is not known what happened to the White Hall plantation house or the associated or integrated fort/prison/depot. What little is known is preserved primarily in the memory and historical interest of the family that now owns the land, and in a rapid archaeological site survey from 33 years ago, lasting perhaps an hour or two, that involved no detailed data analysis, sketches, photography, shovel tests or excavations. This paper aims to fill in some of these gaps by providing a more extensive biography of General Williamson, by reviewing his spy-craft, by analyzing historical documents for clues to White Hall, and by describing the archaeological search for White Hall.

This paper suggests that in addition to the categories of national history and world history, we also need to think of regional history-of which there are two types, one that lies between local and national history and another that lies between national and world history. The period since the French Revolution has been pre-eminently the age of the nation-state, and the ideology of the nation-state emphasizes a singular national narrative, a homogeneous population, and clearly marked borders. But are these achievable in an age of global interconnection? The paper examines regional history, which emphasizes none of these things, by means of an analysis of the Chattanooga Regional History Museum, in Tennessee, USA. The paper suggests that historians should resist the temptation to convert regional history into national history; for whose central-subject narrative is to have priority, who will decide, and how? We should also remember that the idea of the ethnically homogeneous nation-state is a recent invention. These considerations invite us to rethink the contingent bases of the nation-state.

This is a history of a Riverton, Alabama once a prosperous town along the Tennessee River in Franklin and later Colbert counties Alabama but now only memories remain. Riverton was lost to the flooding of the Tennessee Valley due to construction of the TVA Dams (Pickwick Dam and lake specifically)

Joshua Pettit traveled the South Branch, VA area and stopped in at the Steenbergen Ordinary at various times in 1767, 1768 and 1770. This Joshua Pettit was there in 1768 at the same time as Richard Pearis.  Both Pettit and Pearis appear on the record together in Cherokee country in South Carolina.  Pettit sold 500 acres of Cherokee land obtained from Pearis to John Armstrong before settling in on Lawson's Fork of the Pacolet River.

I have often described my choice to attend graduate school as a journey to create "intellectual roots." As my friends have heard me say, my underlying compulsion to study 19 th century environmental history has been to "read about people walking around in the woods and seeing new worlds." In the academic process, I have learned to explore these new worlds with historical and historiographical questions. I present this thesis as a token of appreciation for the journey I have been on these last few years. This journey has not been solitary. I thank my first professional mentors, Bill Worthen and Swannee Bennett, at Historic Arkansas Museum for entrusting me with a research project that was powerful in its social consequence and which gave me the confidence to apply to graduate school. My research on slavery in Little Rock also introduced me to the staff at the Arkansas History Commission, who also aided in portions of this project. I also thank John Willis and the History department at Sewanee for creating a space for my intellectual curiosity. Allison Marsh, Woody Holton, Tom Lekan, Mark Smith, and the faculty at South Carolina have subsequently encouraged and honed my interests into intellectually compelling projects. I continue to revitalize my curiosity about the land, the past, and my place in it both professionally and personally. I love my yearly adventures as a ranger in the National Park Service where I can share my ideas and findings with the broader public. Finally, thank you to my mom and dad, who have taught me that there is history in every place, music for all occasions, and maps pointing to the next adventures.

Special Considerations Please note that many items in this collection have been cleaned for mold residue. In addition to the items that have been cleaned, many other documents may exhibit staining or other signs of mold damage. Individuals with sensitivities to mold may wish to use a mask when handling items from this collection Cope Family Papers Collection 1486

Chapter 1 "Some as Fine Land as I Ever Saw"……………………………………….19 Chapter 2 "A Temporary Expedient"…………………………………………………43 Chapter 3 "Furth Fortune and Fill the Fetters"…………………………………….….80 Chapter 4 "Deep Strokes of Monopoly in the West"…………………………….….116 Chapter 5 "The Very Worst Kind of Military Government"…………………….…..

I would like to thank my chair, Sue Juster, for reading several chapters, writing endless reference letters, and making very thoughtful comments that I have the privilege of continuing to address for years to do them justice. I additionally want to thank my other committee members (David Hancock, Mills Thornton, and Scotti Parrish), all of whom have also read conference papers, written reference letters, and trooped through this overly long dissertation. Sue also reassured me I had a good idea worth pursuing, which helped motivate me through frustrating archival setbacks. Research takes money, and the Rackham Graduate School, the History Department, the English Department, and the Sweetland Writing Center of the University of Michigan have generously supported my graduate education. Amherst College also gave me well-timed supplementary fellowships. The David Library of the American Revolution gave me a wonderful month of research, including a most wonderful porch to write on in the evening. I also benefited from their tremendous holdings of documents from the British Public Records Office. Reference staffers at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the South Caroliniana Library, and the South Carolina Historical Society were very helpful. I especially want to thank the overworked and overharried staff at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, who iv were unfailingly pleasant in the face of constant budget cuts, layoffs, and strident (and often rude) demands from the general public. My family has fielded lots of phone calls, requests for money, and trips home. My poor father had to clean out his office every time I came back so I would have somewhere to sleep, and he never complained to me. He also went to Moore's Creek Bridge with me one sunny Saturday, even though he prefers Civil War history. My mother reminded me writing is hard, and her laughter is always infectious. My sister made me talk about other things, and sometimes came from Oberlin to meet me in Toledo for ice cream.

Caves have offered the Cherokee people concealment before and after contact with Europeans. With the invention of Sequoyah's Syllabary a way to record these hidden activities became available. A number of caves in the southeastern United States contain such historical inscriptions and interpreting these can tell archaeologists about who made them and when they were made. This paper considers several such inscription caves, located in the area of north Alabama, north Georgia, and southeastern Tennessee, with Sequoyan Syllabary on the walls. They offer us a better understanding of the Chickamauga Cherokee, the Lower town Cherokee, and the birth of the Cherokee Nation. On the surface, the Cherokee were compliant with the demands of the overwhelming American Governments policy, but traditions were kept alive by concealment. The writing in caves in the southeastern United States can provide missing links to historical accounts and provide new archaeological research avenues for the future.

The United States of America owns nearly 150,000 hectares of mountain land in northeastern Tennessee. Administered as the northern half of the Cherokee National Forest, these lands were purchased primarily between 1915 and 1941 under Weeks Act authority. The United States Forest Service has not established the intensive forestry that it originally hoped to bring to this area, nor has it created the jobs that it once planned. But the land is in far better condition than it was eighty years ago. An urban forest more than a tree farm, this national forest is still to be appreciated.