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Welcome to the Hidden History of Texas. this is Episode 39 – The Cherokee – The  “Principal People”

Forced out of their ancestral homes in what is now the American Southeast by pressure from Anglo Europeans, the Cherokee, or as they call themselves the Ani-Yunwiya, or the principal people, came  to settle in what is now East Texas.

Their ancestral lands included a large percentage of the southern Appalachian highlands, which included segments  of Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. They were an agricultural people and the similarities between their Iroquoian language and tribal  migration legends tend to indicate that the tribe originated further to the north of their traditional settled homeland.

It was approximately 1540 when Europeans first encountered the Cherokees, that was when Hernando De Soto’s party traveled through their lands. After that 1^st and brief encounter it would be more than a hundred years before they had any additional significant interactions with Europeans. It was in the 1670s that prolonged contact between the Cherokees’ and the Europeans took place. The Cherokees  quickly adapted many of the basic and fundamental material elements of European culture to their own society. This tendency in turn led the Anglo Europeans  to call them, the “Five Civilized Tribes.”

In response to their, what was a successful attempt to adapt to their Anglo-European neighbors, they established a constitutional government with a senate, a house of representatives, and an elected chief. In 1821, Sequoyah, AKA George Gist or George Guess, took the tribe’s spoken words and created a written language. The Cherokee placed a high value on education and in many instances-maintained schools for their children.

While it is true that the Cherokees did derive some advantages from interaction with Europeans, those advantages were far outweighed by the negative effects of that contact. Due to the European desire for territory and empire building, the Cherokee were often decimated by wars, epidemics due to the new diseases introduced by the Europeans, and food shortages. Put together these all caused the population to decline, the area of their territory reduced, and a general weakening of their  group identity.

In an attempt to maintain their culture, between the years 1790 and 1820, many Cherokees voluntarily migrated west of the Mississippi River. These peoples selttled in what is now Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. Eventually those who had tried to remain on their ancestral land in the Southeast were ultimately forced to move west due to the implementation of  the 1830 United States Indian removal policy. Between the years 1838 and 1839, 16,000 to 18,000 Cherokees were forcibly marched to their new home in northeastern Indian Territory. An estimated 4,000 individuals died on the march, which we now know as the Trail of Tears.

It was in 1807  when Cherokees were first reported in Texas, that took place when a small band, probably from one of the Arkansas settlements, established a village on the banks of the Red River. In the summer of that year, a delegation of Cherokees, Pascagoulas, Chickasaws, and Shawnees sought permission from Spanish officials in Nacogdoches, to permanently settle members of their tribes in that province. Hoping to use the group as a buffer against further expansion by the Americans, the Spanish authorities approved the request.

For the next few years a small number of Cherokees drifted in and out of Texas. Between 1812 and 1819, the population of Arkansas began to increase and once again the Cherokees were forced to migrate and more of them migrated into Southern Arkansas. But by 1820,  they could no longer avoid American competition for the land. At the same time Anglo-Americans had established seven settlements in the valley of the Red River, and the Cherokees decided to move even further south. At that time, In early 1820, Chief Bowl, also known as Duwali, led some sixty Cherokee families into Texas. They settled first on the Three Forks of the Trinity River (at the site of present Dallas). This worked temporarily, until pressure from plains tribes forced them to move again, this time eastward into what was almost a virtually uninhabited region north of Nacogdoches that is now in Rusk County. Once they settled there they were able to carve out farms on land that belonged to their friends, the Caddoes. The Caddos, who had once been a powerful Indian confederacy were happy to have allies on their land. This group flourished and finally by 1822 the Texas Cherokee population had grown to nearly three hundred.

While the Cherokees were establishing and building homes in East Texas, Spain turned over the government of Texas to Mexico. This didn’t really affect the status of the Cherokees because the Mexican officials, much like the Spanish, were pleased to have them in Texas.

The leaders of the Cherokee, from their experiences in the Southeastern part of the United States, understood how important it was to have legal title to real property. Even though a Cherokee diplomat Richard Fields, did his best to convince the Mexican government that the tribe had been granted land north of the Old San Antonio road between the Trinity and Sabine Rivers. The Mexican government refused to recognize the claim. With the Mexican government not granting title to the land, there was little the Cherokee could do as the number of Anglos coming into Texas continued to climb.

The two cultures did not trust the other and this tension was exacerbated by  the  alarm the Mexican officials began to feel about possibly losing Texas to the United States. This resulted in the Law of April 6, 1830, which prohibited further American immigration to Texas. Meanwhile, the Mexicans tried to resurrect their plans about using the Cherokees as a buffer against American immigration. By 1830 the Cherokee population of Texas was now approaching 400; with the tribe congregating in at least three but possibly as many as seven towns north of Nacogdoches along the Sabine River and its tributaries. Desperate to receive some help from the Cherokee, Mexican officials finally proposed giving the Cherokees title to their land. This failed because the Cherokee lacked the money and legal expertise to complete the complicated procedure

In 1832, when Anglo-Texans began to protest against Mexican rule, maintaining faint hope of eventually securing legal rights to their land meant the Cherokees would stay loyal to the Mexican government. When the Texas Revolution erupted in 1835, the Cherokees still had not obtained title to their land, and their previous loyalty to Mexico made the revolutionary government in Texas wary of them. To help solve this, the Cherokees declared themselves neutral in the conflict between Texas and Mexico.  The Texas revolutionary government, in order to make sure their Eastern flank was secure, was anxious to ensure continued Cherokee neutrality. In the fall of 1835, the government sent Sam Houston to meet with the tribe. The choice of Houston to lead the negotiations and who was the newly elected commander of the Texan forces, made sense because he was an adopted member of the Cherokee tribe. He was also a very influential advocate for the rights of the Cherokee people. In November 1835 the Consultation, acting on Houston’s recommendation, did pledge to recognize Cherokee claims to the land north of the Old San Antonio Road and the Neches River and west of the Angelina and Sabine Rivers. The government also appointed John Forbes, John Cameron, and General Houston as commissioners and authorized them to negotiate a final treaty with the tribe.

The agreement that came from those meetings, did in fact establish a reservation for the Cherokees in East Texas. While this was significantly less land than the Cherokee desired,  they agreed to sign because they believed it finally gave them a permanent home.

The reservation included the entirety of what is now Smith and Cherokee counties as well as parts of Van Zandt, Rusk, and Gregg counties. In 1836,  Eight Cherokee leaders, including Duwali and Big Mush, signed the agreement. However, the Texas government refused to ratify the treaty primarily because a minority of the tribe remained pro-Mexican, a fact that greatly complicated Texan-Cherokee relations.

In the next episode I’ll look further into the relationships between the Texans and the Cherokee.

That’s going to do it for this episode. Please subscribe to the podcast, I try to keep posting new episodes, sometimes though life gets in the way and there’s a gap between. But hey and remember if you want more information on Texas History, visit the Texas State Historical Association. I also have three audiobooks on the Hidden History of Texas one which deals with the 1500s to about 1820,  one 1820s to 1830s, and the latest release the 1830 to 1836, the Texas revolution period. You can find the books pretty much wherever you download or listen to audiobooks. Just do a search for the Hidden History of Texas by Hank Wilson and they’ll pop right up. Links to all the stores are on my website https://arctx.org– You can also find me articles on Medium

Thanks for listening y’all