By Stephen Carr Hampton
Grand Prize Gold winner in the 20th Annual Solas Awards
A Cherokee returns to his ancestors’ homeland in Tennessee.
I went, knowing I was the first in four generations, back to my family’s homeland. Back to where my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Parks, was born high up along the Ocoee River, a stone’s throw from where today’s Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia touch each other. When he came into the world in 1821, this was Cherokee Nation.
Thomas was sixteen when he was responsible for driving a wagon on the Trail of Tears. His older brother was with him, as well as many others in his – my – family. This was the 11th Detachment, led by his uncle – my great-great-grand-uncle – Dick Taylor. Uncle Dick was a member of the Cherokee National Committee. Decades later, in Indian Territory, he became Assistant Chief.
After the Trail of Tears, no one ever went back. Not my dad, nor my grandparents, nor my great-grandparents. They lived and died in Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma, which is now, at least in part, again, Cherokee Nation.
I’ve traveled for one reason or another to much of the US – all over the West, much of the East, and some of the South. But I’d never been anywhere near the original Cherokee homeland in the southern Appalachians. I’d been several times to my father’s boyhood home outside Grove, Oklahoma, which still stands today, though the land was lost long ago to the Allotment Act.
Two things about Natives and land: we certainly have a special connection to it, reflected in our language and culture, but we now live in a country that has used everything from guns, graft, and laws to separate us from it.
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I went to Tennessee to attend the annual Trail of Tears Association conference. I especially wanted to see the land, smell the air, look at the trees, and hear the birds of my ancestors’ homeland.
Our base was Chattanooga, the only large city within the borders of the final Cherokee cession. Cession – that’s a word Cherokees know well. They serve as tick marks on our historical timeline, beginning with the 1st Cession in 1721 and ending with the 36th in 1838. The last one was not really a cession, in that it was involuntary. Actually, all of them were coerced in some way or another. The last cession began at dawn on May 26th, when seven thousand US soldiers began going farm to farm, cabin to cabin, door to door, taking us at gunpoint. Families were separated in the chaos. By nightfall, white pioneers moved in, taking our homes, furniture, and livestock.
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At the conference, we learned that the planning for the roundup began a few months earlier, when wagons hauling lumber appeared, and the US Army built about two dozen open-air stockades across northern Georgia and southern Tennessee. We also learned that most of those soldiers were the same pioneers who took our homes. The US Army hired them as state militia volunteers.
The decision to remove the Cherokee began before that. Removal – that’s another word well-known to Cherokees. It means removing Natives from their homeland, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
During the 1820s and 30s, two different trajectories were in motion. Among the big rolling hills and green valleys of the southern Appalachians, where corn and candy roaster squash still grow in the sticky warmth of summer, the Cherokees were rapidly establishing a modern nation. We had a constitution and territorial boundaries confirmed by the US Supreme Court. Everyone knew that, when you crossed the Hiwassee River at Walker’s Ferry, you went from Tennessee to Cherokee Nation. You can see the abbreviation “CN” on old maps. That Walker – John Walker Sr. – was one of my ancestors.
At that time, CN had a capitol, a bi-cameral legislature, a museum, a printing press, a newspaper (the Cherokee Phoenix, still in press today), our own alphabet (called a syllabary), and a literacy rate that was higher than that of the white settlers around us. Many in our leadership had been educated in New England and were fluent in both English and Cherokee. The Cherokee people had houses, farms, schools, churches, roads, horse-drawn wagons, livestock, barns, and orchards. Some ordered clothes from Atlanta using catalogs. A few had plantations and enslaved Blacks. For all that, white people called us “civilized.”
The other trajectory was the push for ethnic cleansing. The Indian Removal Act, the focus of Andrew Jackson’s campaign, passed in 1832. In the House, the vote was 102 to 97. It never would have passed but for the conservative southern delegation, which gained an extra 21 members because they were allowed to count their enslaved Blacks as 3/5ths of a person. The Act “opened up” – another euphemism – the Black Belt, allowing the establishment of some of the world’s largest slave plantations. Black representation was thus twisted and used against them and us.
The Cherokee’s fight to remain in our homeland was long and complicated, filled with threats, violence, imprisonment, fierce debates in Washington, and even petitions from white liberals in small towns in New England. Another ancestor, John Walker Jr., the son of the aforementioned Walker, was assassinated by our own people for suggesting we sell out. He was on his way home from a CN Council meeting at the time. My great-great-grandfather James Allen Thompson was arrested along with white missionaries for being a white man among the Cherokees without a permit. Their case eventually went to the Supreme Court. They won. To this day, Worcester v Georgia is the foundational case in Indian law. The court asserted that states have no jurisdiction over Native tribes. The expression, “since time immemorial,” comes from the majority opinion.
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At the conference we visited Red Clay, now a state park. “That’s Georgia right there,” we were told, on the other side of that wooded country lane. After the state of Georgia raided our capitol at Echota, we relocated here, across the Tennessee line.
Looking at the beauty of Red Clay’s green meadows and towering oaks and tulip trees, the pain of leaving our homeland felt palpable. While the group had coffee, I wandered off on my own. Eastern phoebes perched on wooded fenceposts and brown-headed nuthatches flitted in the canopy. I was happy to see bay-breasted and magnolia warblers, fall migrants headed south to Venezuela and Guatemala. These birds were survivors.
In the center of the park is the Blue Hole, a deep aqua spring of unknowable depth, shaded by tall trees. It pours forth thousands of gallons of crystal pure water every hour. This sustained my people when thousands of us gathered for national councils during those last critical years.
A stone’s throw from the Blue Hole is the Eternal Flame. Traditionally, at the ancestral mother town of Kituwah in the mountains of North Carolina, a sacred flame burned atop a temple mound. Each year, torch by torch, the fire was distributed by the clan mothers to relight all the home fires across the land. In this way, the Cherokee are “the people of one fire.” Kept lit in the back of a wagon, this flame was carried on the Trail of Tears all the way to Oklahoma. Decades later, it was brought back to Red Clay, where it was re-united with the fire of the Eastern Band of Cherokees still living in North Carolina.
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Packed onto three big tour buses, we left the sanctuary of Red Clay and drove north toward the Hiwassee River, the northern border of CN, from whence the soldiers came. We were on a winding county two-lane surrounded by hay fields, patches of woodland, and scattered farm houses. The sky was blue, dotted with perfect puffballs of cloud. Tennessee opened up as we drove. That’s a Cherokee word – Tennessee. It comes from Tenasi, a historic Cherokee town, now buried by the Tellico Dam.
“This area right here, and also over there on the other side of the road,” our leader pointed out the window from the front of the bus. These were the probable locations of the camps where nearly two-thousand people, mostly children, died before we even began the journey west.
After the roundup in May 1838, over twelve thousand us of spent the summer at Fort Cass, waiting to cross the Tennessee River once and for all. It was unusually hot and the river was low. Early detachments had suffered, the people packed like sheep on barges struggling over gravel bars.
So we waited all that summer.
The mood was sullen, the people in shock that one historical trajectory would be subsumed by the other in the span of a single day. One hot afternoon the quiet was broken by a single gunshot. It came from just across the Hiwassee on the north side. A contingent of Eastern Cherokee had just arrived from the North Carolina mountains, a convoy herded like cattle. An elder, taking in the scene – the soldiers and the massive encampment of people, obviously consigned to be put on ferries to cross the Tennessee and never return – sat down under a large oak and shot himself in the head.
Looking out the bus windows was all we could do. There was no shoulder, no pullouts, and no place to stop. Not even a roadside historical marker. I asked our leader if this was largest unmarked mass grave in the US. “Dunno,” he said, “It just might be.” I took a blurry picture out the window.
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At the Hiwassee Visitor Center, our group walked down a winding path among scattered saplings. Here there were large interpretive signs placed along it, like a slalom course. We hit every one. During that hot summer, the Cherokee government negotiated with the US Army, gaining permission to manage our own ethnic cleansing. We would get wagons and horses for our gear and travel overland. The army would reimburse us. This had the unique feature of making the Cherokee removal remarkably well-documented.
On the interpretive signs we saw enlarged copies on US Army stationary – excerpts of letters, receipts, and reports. One invoice was for lumber “for making 185 coffins for Cherokee emigrants who died near this fort between 26 July and 20 Sept 1838… and 284 coffins for children…”
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The next day we went to Blythe’s Ferry. There, at the confluence of the Hiwassee and Tennessee Rivers, stands the Cherokee Removal Memorial. I’d seen monuments to even more painful history, at the Gate of No Return at the Cape Coast castle in Ghana, and another on the beach at Ouidah, Benin, where Africans were chained and thrown into the holds of ships bound for Brazil and South Carolina. Just like there, here in Tennessee there were interpretive panels describing the events, the horrors faced by the victims largely implied by the gravity of the evocative images on marble pillars, and the panels inscribed with poignant quotes.
“They captured men and women in their homes, farmers working in their fields, and children at play. The captives were often given no time to gather their belongings and were marched away with nothing but the clothes on their backs.”
Somehow, being several generations removed, I never expected my people to be the focus of a Gate of No Return memorial.
And then there were the names. After reading a summary of the history on the columns, and then crossing a patio with a massive inlaid map of the Trail of Tears, we came to seven marbled slabs, taller than us, and arranged like a traditional Cherokee seven-pointed star, representing our seven clans. On each of them were hundreds of names.
I began seeing some I recognized. Uncle Dick Taylor was there, as was James Allen Thompson and others. They only listed the heads of households. Each name implied perhaps five or ten more people.
We walked down to the banks of the Tennessee, its half-mile width gliding past on the warm October afternoon. A Carolina wren sang from the riverside thickets. Cherokees have a tradition we call “going to water,” a kind of ritual to submerge, cleanse, and purify ourselves. But this river, at this place, was about removal. About leaving. And once they crossed, no one ever returned. Until now.
We didn’t go in.
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Stephen Carr Hampton (Cherokee/Choctaw) writes about Native issues, birds, and environmental issues. In addition to his Substack, his essays have been published in Native News Online, Yahoo News, Earth Island Journal, and Birding magazine. He has been featured on several podcasts, as well as in The Atlantic by Ed Yong. He is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation (ᏣᎳᎩ).