Cherokee Nation History

In this new bundle audiobook from Captivating History, you will discover the shocking and controversial history of the Native Americans.

In December 1835, fewer than five hundred Cherokee signed the Treaty of New Echota—a document never ratified by the Cherokee National Council or the Cherokee people. Congress accepted it anyway, by a single vote. Three years later, sixteen thousand Cherokee were marched at bayonet point from Georgia to Oklahoma. Four thousand died in stockades, on frozen roads, and by the ice-choked Mississippi. The mortality rate rivaled the Bataan Death March. General Winfield Scott's orders called for "every possible kindness," yet one in four never arrived.

Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U.S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains.