The Cherokee Removal and Tsali: How a Remnant Stayed in the North Carolina Mountains

In the last days of May 1838, soldiers began walking up to Cherokee farms across the southern Appalachians and ordering families out. People left with whatever they could carry, and many left behind crops, livestock and houses that white neighbors were already waiting to claim. The families were marched to stockades and holding camps, to wait for the journey west.

In the North Carolina mountains, some Cherokee slipped away instead. Their descendants are the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose center today is the town of Cherokee in Swain County.

A treaty most Cherokee rejected

The removal rested on the Treaty of New Echota, signed on December 29, 1835. A small faction of Cherokee, including Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, signed it. They did not have the backing of the Cherokee National Council or of Principal Chief John Ross, who gathered thousands of signatures on petitions against it.

The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in May 1836 by a margin of a single vote over the two-thirds required. The Cherokee were given two years to leave their lands in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina. When the deadline of May 23, 1838 passed, President Martin Van Buren's administration sent General Winfield Scott with several thousand regular troops and state militia to enforce it.

The roundup in the mountains

Soldiers began the roundup in Georgia in late May and moved through the other states within days. In North Carolina, Fort Butler, near present-day Murphy, served as a main post for operations. Families were held in camps where disease spread in the summer heat, and most of the Cherokee who set out west did so in the fall and winter of 1838 to 1839.

Of roughly 16,000 Cherokee removed, historians commonly estimate that about 4,000 died in the camps and on the journey. That figure is an estimate, since no one kept careful counts at the time. The Cherokee name for the ordeal translates roughly as the place where they cried, which English speakers came to call the Trail of Tears.

Tsali and the story told about him

The best-known account of the Carolina side comes from Tsali, a Cherokee man whose family lived in the Valley River area. In the version recorded by the ethnologist James Mooney in 1900, soldiers were taking Tsali's family to a stockade when a soldier prodded his wife with a bayonet. Tsali and others overpowered the soldiers, killed one, and fled into the mountains.

General Scott, according to this account, then made a bargain through William Holland Thomas, a white trader who had been adopted by the Cherokee leader Yonaguska. If Tsali and the men responsible surrendered, the troops would stop hunting the other fugitives. Tsali, his brother and two of his sons gave themselves up and were shot by a firing squad, reportedly made up of other Cherokee prisoners. His youngest son was spared because of his age.

Historians do not agree on how much of this is exact. The broad outline, that a family resisted, a soldier died and Tsali was executed in late 1838, is generally accepted. The idea that his death alone bought freedom for the others is harder to prove, because Scott was already under pressure to end the campaign, and some Cherokee in North Carolina had a legal claim to stay. Tsali's sacrifice has become a founding story for the Eastern Band, and it should be read as both history and memory.

From fugitives to a recognized tribe

Estimates of the people who remained in North Carolina after 1838 vary. Mooney put the number at about a thousand, a group that included the Oconaluftee Cherokee, who lived along the river of that name and had a stronger legal claim to stay, along with those who had hidden in the mountains. Yonaguska led the Oconaluftee community until his death in 1839, and Thomas then became its legal agent.

North Carolina law at the time did not let Cherokee people own land, so Thomas bought tracts in his own name for them. This arrangement was fragile. His finances collapsed after the Civil War, and years of litigation followed before the land titles were settled. The tract that became the Qualla Boundary is held in trust by the federal government, and North Carolina chartered the Eastern Band as a corporation in 1889.

Today the Eastern Band is a federally recognized tribe, separate from the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band in Oklahoma. Its seat is in Cherokee, at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains. The outdoor drama Unto These Hills, first staged in 1950, and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian keep the Tsali story and the wider removal before visitors, and they show what happened to the people who were forced out and to those who stayed.