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The following data is extracted from Cherokee of the Smoky Mountains.

government caused a rupture between the Federal and State authorities. President Monroe approved the suggestion of the Indian agent that the Cherokee lands be allotted, the surplus sold for their benefit, and the Indians invested with full rights of citizenship in the States where they resided. But Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia refused to allow any Indians to live within their boundaries on any pretext whatever. Georgia further demanded cession of all Indian lands within the limits of her charter.

Naturally the Cherokees protested that their limits were defined by treaties with the United States, and they declared that "It is the fixed and unalterable determination of this Nation never again to cede one foot more of land."

The Governor of Georgia in reply blamed the missionaries for the refusal of the Indians to "move on," and informed the Federal government that if it backed up the Indians and resisted occupancy of their lands by Georgians it would have a fratricidal war on its hands.

The thread of Indian tenure thus strained was soon snapped by an unexpected turn of affairs. Gold was discovered in the Cherokee country, and the white man’s greed burst all bonds of law or morality. At the same time Andrew Jackson, an out-and-out Indian hater, became President of the United States. From that moment the doom of the Cherokees was sealed.

How the Cherokee Nation was then driven at the point of the bayonet .to the far West, and by what strange means a few hundred of their people, starving in the gulfs of the Great Smoky Mountains, but still indomitable, were at last permitted to retain a fragment of their ancient birthright, is one of the most dramatic episodes in American history.

The existence of gold in the Cherokee country was well known to Spanish adventurers who followed after De Soto in the last half of the sixteenth century. There is evidence that they carried on some mining operations in that region. But they kept their knowledge secret, and it perished when they left the country. Then a century went by before the English appeared on the scene, and another century before any gold finds were reported in the South.

In North Carolina the first mint returns appeared in

Source: Cherokee of the Smoky Mountains

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