THE FIRST OFFICIAL CHEROKEE EXPLORERS of the Arkansas river valley came in 1809. This was just six years after the United States purchased the huge inland Empire of Louisiana from the French. They came because, in the homelands of the Lower Cherokees, in Georgia and Alabama, the White settlers were pushing them back, invading their ancestral hunting grounds and demanding that the native Cherokees be moved to the new American wilderness empire.
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THE
EASTERN CHEROKEES WHO REMAINED behind in
Georgia and Alabama when the Western Cherokees crossed
the Mississippi, had been making important strides in the
development of a true Cherokee culture.
The Lower Cherokees returned to their homelands with such favorable reports of the land between the Arkansas and White rivers that many families moved immediately, without either the aid or the coercion of the United States government. By 1817, about 2,000 Lower Cherokees were in the western lands where they became known as the Arkansas or Western Cherokees. In 1822, an unlettered but brilliant Cherokee, Sequoyah, developed a completely phonetic alphabet for the Cherokee language, the first alphabet for any Indian tribe. The alphabet was so simple that even illiterate Indians could learn to use it rapidly. Another major achievement came in 1827 when the Cherokees became the first American Indian tribe with a written constitution. Under the constitution written at the Cherokee capital at New Echota, Georgia, Jotin Hoss was elected Principal Chief, highest administrative office in the Cherokee Nation. |
