Tsali and the Cherokees Who Stayed: Removal in the North Carolina Mountains, 1838

In the last week of May 1838, soldiers moved through the river valleys of western North Carolina and pulled Cherokee families out of their cabins and fields. Many had little time to gather belongings. They were marched to stockades such as Fort Butler, at present-day Murphy, to wait for the journey to Indian Territory.

Most of them would go. A few hundred did not. Some were exempt, some hid in the high country, and some took part in a bargain that is still remembered, and still argued over, in the mountains. Their descendants are the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

A treaty few Cherokees accepted

The removal rested on the Treaty of New Echota, signed on December 29, 1835. A small faction of Cherokees, including Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, signed it. They had no authority from the Cherokee National Council, and Principal Chief John Ross opposed the treaty. A petition against it carried about 16,000 signatures.

The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in May 1836 by a single vote. The Cherokees were given until May 23, 1838, to leave. That spring General Winfield Scott arrived with several thousand regular troops and state militia and began the roundup, which started in Georgia in the last days of May.

The roundup in the mountains

The Cherokee homeland stretched across parts of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina. In the North Carolina mountains, troops built or used posts such as Fort Butler in Cherokee County and Fort Lindsay near present-day Bryson City in Swain County. Families were held in these places before being sent west.

Detention camps were crowded, and sickness spread. Overall, historians commonly estimate that about 16,000 Cherokees were removed and that roughly 4,000 died in the stockades and on the journey west. This is the history later called the Trail of Tears.

Some Cherokees avoided capture. The steep, forested country of the Great Smoky Mountains was hard for soldiers unfamiliar with it to search. Fugitives hid in coves and ridges, while others stayed in places where the army's attention was uneven.

Tsali and the army's bargain

The best-known account was recorded by the ethnologist James Mooney, who collected it from Cherokee and white informants in the 1880s and 1890s. In his telling, a man called Tsali, also known as Charley, was being marched with his wife, brother, sons and others when a soldier prodded his wife with a bayonet. Tsali's party attacked the guards, and at least one soldier was killed. They then fled into the mountains.

Mooney says the army then offered terms. If Tsali and the men responsible gave themselves up, the troops would stop hunting the other fugitives and let them stay. William Holland Thomas, a white trader adopted by the Oconaluftee Cherokee leader Yonaguska, is generally said to have been involved as a go-between. Tsali, his brother and his oldest son surrendered and were shot. In the traditional account, Cherokee prisoners were made to carry out the execution. Tsali's youngest son, Wasituna, was spared because of his age.

Historians do not agree on how much of this is reliable. Army records of the episode are thin, and the surviving versions differ on details such as who made the offer. Some scholars point out that officers were already reluctant to keep chasing scattered families through the mountains, so the bargain may not have been the only reason the others were left alone. What is not in doubt is that Tsali's name became central to how the Eastern Band remembers 1838.

Becoming the Eastern Band

The people who remained came from several groups. They included residents of the Oconaluftee valley, who had a stronger legal claim to stay in North Carolina, and fugitives such as the band led by Euchella, also called Utsala, who negotiated their way out of hiding. Estimates for the 1840s are about 1,000 people. An 1848 census, the Mullay roll, counted about 1,500 Cherokees in North Carolina.

Their legal position was precarious. As Native people, they were not recognized as citizens of North Carolina, and they had trouble holding land. Thomas bought tracts in his own name on their behalf. Those purchases became the core of what is now the Qualla Boundary, the Eastern Band's land base.

The Eastern Band received a state charter in 1889. Today it is a federally recognized tribe, separate from the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band in Oklahoma. Its capital, the town of Cherokee, lies next to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in the country where the fugitives hid in 1838.

Removal split the Cherokee people in two. The Cherokees who went west and the ones who stayed each had to rebuild their communities, and both remain Cherokee.