The Cherokees saw what happened to the Creeks and they didn't want to share the
same fate. They thought that if they learn to live like the whites, they could
live peacefully alongside them. They believe that if they accepted white
culture, they could live in Georgia on the land of their mothers and fathers
forever.
This is a very significant site in that this was the capital of the
Cherokee Nation. Just like Washington DC is our capital, this was the capital of
the Cherokee Nation.
This is New Echota. It's a State Historic Site now but back
in the 1820s and 30s, this was the capital of the Cherokee Nation.
Frank Emubarn who was superintendent of the site explains.
Pretty much by 1890
the whole town was gone. So, using your imagination, you have to kind of piece it
back together. There's 60 or 70 people that lived here year-round, 30 or 40
different buildings, and there was like town streets laid out.
It was a town much
like any other in Northwest Georgia at that time. There was a combination hotel
tavern and general store and there were homes where the Cherokees lived about
the same as white settlers did.
And this building that we're coming up to now and
it's an 1830 structure and it's to show people how a middle-class Cherokee
family would have lived. By the 1830s, they were living in log cabins just like
this one here. So this gives you a good idea as to how not just the Cherokees
but how the settlers were living as well. So this was kind of like a parallel culture.
The Cherokees were living in almost every way like the settlers, using
beds and fireplaces and looms to make cloth. They even set their tables the same.
That thing you see, that's a piece of china. This kind of blue feather edge
china and that was imported from England, this piece right here. Okay this was made
in a factory. This was very very common, that's a lot like our our everyday China.
There were even wealthy plantation owners like James Van who built large
comfortable homes. They led the Cherokees, adopting a lifestyle parallel to white
culture. The Cherokees were the first Native
Americans to have a written language, created by a gifted artist named Sequoia.
An impressive number of Cherokees could read and write and there was a print
shop at New Echota that printed a newspaper called the Phoenix, printed in
English and Cherokee. It was in the Phoenix that the Cherokees printed their
constitution. That document created an entirely new system of government.
This building here this is the Supreme Court and it's a model of what the original
building would have looked like. Now the Supreme Court would have met here in the
fall of the year okay and the downstairs part of the building, this is where they
held their court meetings. Now in the Supreme Court there were three judges
that sat on the panel. It wasn't it wasn't a jury.
It sounds a lot like our government today.
As a matter of fact, the Cherokees had adopted the the European style of
governing and they had written their constitution that was basically
patterned after the United States Constitution.
Why did the Cherokees change their form of government?
Hopefully they could get along with
everyone and in the changing times and hopefully that they would be able to
retain their government and their and their tribe here in Georgia. By being the
same, perhaps they would not be removed. To me that is the tragedy of the whole story.
The tragedy is that all the settlers really wanted from the
Cherokees was their land, which covered the entire northwest corner of Georgia.
They wanted it for farms and for gold.
In 1829 this man Benjamin Parks found gold
on Cherokee land near Dahlonega. Overnight there was a rush of people to
the mountains of Georgia all of them hoping to strike it rich. It was the end
of hope for the Cherokee. To force the Cherokees to leave the state legislature
enacted a series of unjust laws. It became illegal for Cherokees to dig gold
on their own land. They could not testify against white men in court. The Cherokee
council was forbidden to assemble. The state even divided up Cherokee land and
sold it in a lottery. This is one of the original lottery
tickets showing the piece of land at some settler won at the expense of a
Cherokee family. Finally the Cherokees were forced to sign a treaty giving up
their land in Georgia.
The Treaty of New Echota was signed here in 1835. That
treaty pretty much sealed the fate of the Cherokee Nation and that resulted in
the forced removal of the Cherokee or what we would call the the Trail of Tears.
John Ridge, a Cherokee leader, spoke against removal.
You asked us to throw
off the hunter and warrior state, we did so. You asked us to form a Republican
government, we did so. Adopting your own as a model. You asked us to cultivate the
earth, we did so. You asked us to learn to read, we did so.
But it wasn't enough. In
spite of the Cherokees success in adopting white culture, in the end they
were banished from Georgia.
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