When it came time to kidnap and imprison the Cherokee, the U.S. Army cleared and widened an ancient Native American path from the Cheoah Valley in Graham County, North Carolina, through Long Creek Valley and over Snowbird Mountain until they reached Pile Ridge in Cherokee County where they would hold the prisoners until they could be death-marched more than 900 miles away to Oklahoma Territory.
Thousands of Cherokee died along the way. The old, the young and the feeble were first to go, and then many of the healthy — all ravaged by cold, rain, heat or snow, and weakened by shock, abuse, mistreatment, indifference and hunger.
It was as American as America today where masked and heavily armed troops have been sicced by a vile federal administration on “alien” immigrants in communities from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to New Iberia, Louisiana, from California to Connecticut.
Like the Cherokee of old, the new unwanted are being housed in pop-up prisons designed for cruelty and callousness, managed by private, for-profit Gestapos — the CEO Group, CoreCivic and others that are running these charnel houses of capitalist evil — the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, the Karnes County Detention Center in Texas, the South Florida Detention Center, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” in the cypress swamps of south Florida, and others.
It’s almost as if is 1838 all over again.
We “deported” more than 16,000 Cherokee from their homes in what is now North Carolina, Georgia and the surrounding area to a near desert land in Oklahoma that must have been as foreign to them as the moon.
They went from a temperate rainforest to the humid, subtropical climate of northeastern Oklahoma.
A few Cherokee, of course, didn’t make the trip at all. They hid out in the mountains along the Trail of Tears and avoided the interloping new-comers for years, rebuilding their society and lives day by day until they reassembled the rudiments of a nation.
Today the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina controls approximately 57,000 acres of land, primarily the Qualla Boundary near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The territory spills over parts of five counties and is augmented by outlying parcels owned by the tribe.
The Snowbird Community near Snowbird Mountain along the Trail of Tears route is now owned by the tribe, as is a section of Cherokee County near Marble that today houses a new casino and hotels that are Cherokee owned.