Indigenous Thinkers

Georgia's expulsion of the Cherokees was executed with swift, military precision. In three short weeks in the late spring of 1838, members of the Georgia militia arrested several thousand men, women and children, evicted them from their homes in North Georgia and marched them to military camps in Tennessee for resettlement.

The removal of the Cherokees in Georgia - and later that summer in neighboring states - marked the start of what history now calls the Trail of Tears.

To make sure the episode is not also erased from public consciousness, Atlanta historian Sarah Hill has been doggedly pursuing a trail of a different kind.

The paper trail she has uncovered in state and national archives provides the most detailed picture yet of one of the most shameful chapters in Georgia history.

"Seeing some of the accounts firsthand is a shocking reminder of what is going on today in other parts of the world," Hill said. "But it's a story that most people in Georgia know very little about."

The Cherokee have a saying that the Trail of Tears began at the doorstep of every Cherokee family. Included in Hill's research is an account that starkly reinforces that reality - the testimony of a Cherokee woman named Ooloocha, who recalled the day of removal in her subsequent claim for property the family lost in Georgia:

"The soldiers came and took us from home," she recounted. "They first surrounded our house, and they took the mare while we were at work in the fields and they drove us out of doors and did not permit us to take anything with us, not even a second change of clothes. They kept us in the fort [Fort Wool near present-day Calhoun] and then marched us to Ross's Landing [near present- day Chattanooga]."

A Cherokee census

But there were other perspectives. Two days later, in May 1838, Georgia Militia Capt. William Derrick rounded up more than 425 men, women and children from Cherokee towns and farms near Ellijay in Gilmer County. Derrick proudly attributed his high capture rate to the fact that he had broken up families and refused to let the Indians bring any of their possessions.

An 1835 census of Georgia recorded 8,936 Cherokees - plus 776 Cherokee-owned black slaves and 68 intermarried whites - living in North Georgia, most of them in small towns and log-house farmsteads. Their property included 6,000 dwellings and outbuildings, 80,000 head of livestock and 63,000 peach trees.

By the late summer of 1838, however, nearly all of the Cherokees in Georgia and neighboring states - including their slaves, who accompanied them to Oklahoma - were gone. The Indians' land and property had been given to white settlers.

Hill and other researchers say the confiscation of property and the swift, efficient removal of the entire population of Cherokee villages is eerily like the early stages of the waves of "ethnic cleansing" that swept the Balkans in the 1990s.

"In the late spring of 1838, thousands of Cherokees were forcibly marched along roads leading from their settlements to nearby forts or encampments, then on to the New Echota [near Calhoun] headquarters of the Middle Military Command," Hill said.

"Larger U.S. Army forts in North Carolina, Tennessee or Alabama served as holding areas until the Cherokee could be sent on to Oklahoma."

'Shock and awe' of 1830s

Preparations were under way long before the removal - in some cases as early as 1830, when Congress first passed the Indian Removal Act. Hill says the 15 forts or military posts built in Georgia were not intended to be holding areas for the Cherokees, but to house soldiers and serve as a 19th-century form of "shock and awe" to intimidate the Indians in advance of their eviction and discourage any thought of resistance.

"To expedite removal, all posts were positioned near major roads, which had to be sufficiently wide to accommodate wagons as well as horses and thousands of captives," she said. "All but one of the roads was in place by the time the Cherokees were expelled."

Some evaded the removal, either by hiding out or by virtue of economic status. They eventually became the founding population of the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina.

Georgia, however, was bent on complete expulsion. A multitude of Indian names - from Chattahoochee to Coosawatee - reflect the state's Native American roots, but there are few physical reminders of the Cherokee presence in North Georgia today. They include a handful of historic markers, some with glaring factual errors; the New Echota Historic Site, home of the Cherokee national legislature; and the Chief Vann Historic Site, his two-story brick home near Chatsworth.

Movies, museums and popular accounts have memorialized the 1,000-mile trek to Oklahoma led by Principal Chief John Ross during the harsh winter of 1838-1839 as a symbol of the dark side of American history. In all, 15,000 Cherokees were forcibly evicted. Three thousand of them died en route.

But until recently, many of the gritty details of the removal , and the nature of the trail as many trails, lay lost or neglected in dusty public archives and private collections.

The federally recognized Trail of Tears, which was added to the National Park Service's trails system in the 1980s, is limited to the main routes the Cherokees followed from Tennessee to Oklahoma.

Now, however, Congress is considering legislation that would add previously ignored components of the trail - including the multi-branched feeder routes from the U.S. Army removal forts in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina.

Not all is lost

In preparation for expanding the trail, the Park Service and the individual states have funded new research by Hill and others on the early phases of the removal. Not all traces of the Cherokee removal era, it seems, have vanished completely.

Near Murphy, N.C., for instance, University of North Carolina archaeologist Brett Riggs recently found, on undisturbed tracts of national forest land, the route of the Unicoi Turnpike - intact portions of the wagon road the U.S. Army used to remove the Cherokee more than a century and a half ago.

In addition to archived records of the U.S. Army and the Georgia Militia, which conducted the mass arrest of the Cherokees in Georgia, Hill's paper trail has wound through journals, hand-drawn maps, personal correspondence, court documents, property records and a detailed census of the Cherokee and the property they owned drawn up in preparation for their removal.

"This is the first comprehensive synthesis of state and federal records associated with the Trail of Tears in Georgia, and it represents a monumental amount of research," said Georgia state archaeologist David Crass.

In a state where Civil War history looms large on the landscape, Crass says many Georgia residents have little knowledge of the Indian removal effort and the reasons it occurred, and no Cherokee legacy to touch or feel.

As for future archaeological investigation, Crass says there may be little left to find. Limited excavations at the site of Fort Wool, near Calhoun, and Fort Hoskins, near Chatsworth, have yielded few artifacts. Many of the prospective sites now lie on private property to which archaeologists have no access.

"The other problem is that most of these forts were occupied for only a few weeks," said Crass. "That means that they left very ephemeral signatures. It's not like a house that was lived in for a hundred years and then burned down."

But he is enthusiastic about the rich cache of historical information that Hill has unearthed - and gathered into a 70-page report to the Park Service. "Here in Georgia, the Trail of Tears was one of those events that has left a strange, almost schizoid legacy." he said.

"Sarah's research is about as close as we can get to the objective truth of what happened during those awful years."

'Indian problem' history

Georgia, in fact, played a leading role in the series of events that led to "those awful years." In return for relinquishing its claims to land in the Alabama and Mississippi territories in 1802, the state won a promise from President Thomas Jefferson to help "extinguish"

Indian claims in Georgia.

With the expulsion of the Creeks from Middle Georgia in the 1820s, the Cherokees were the only impediment to expansion by white settlers. Opposition to the Cherokee was undeterred by the fact that they had their own constitution and legislature, patterned after that of the United States, published their own newspaper and had adopted many of the cultural trappings of white European settlers.

The discovery of gold in North Georgia - and the influx of thousands of miners - added new impetus to the Indian removal efforts.

In 1832, Georgia, weary of waiting, began distributing Cherokee lands by lottery and confiscating homes and property.

As tensions mounted, some Cherokees fled to North Carolina to avoid persecution by the Georgia Guard, a loosely organized paramilitary group of self-deputized mountaineers. Then, in 1836, a handful of Cherokee men signed a separate pact with the U.S. government ceding all lands east of the Mississippi for $5 million and free land in Oklahoma.

The agreement, the Treaty of New Echota, provided the U.S.

government with the legal rationale, and a formal deadline, for the eviction of any Cherokees who remained behind.

On May 10, 1838, Gen. Winfield Scott of the U.S. Army warned the Cherokees that the deadline was approaching. "The full moon of May is already on the wane," he said. "And before another shall have passed away, every Cherokee man, woman and child must be in motion to join their brethren in the far West."

The deadline was May 23. And the Georgia Militia - its eagerness amply reflected in Hill's archival research - was ready. On May 26, Gen.

Charles Floyd, a West Point graduate, led the first operation out of New Echota.

Just three weeks later, on June 15, he reported to his superiors that there were no Indians left in Georgia. In fact, a few Cherokees remained, but officially, the state's "Indian problem" was history.