ABSTRACT
The Cherokees originally resided in what is now northern Georgia, Tennessee, and the western Carolinas. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they became active in the deerskin trade introduced into the Southeast by Europeans, but by the late 1700s, Euro-Americans were more interested in land than in trading for hides. From the end of the Revolutionary War through the 1830s, the U.S. pressured the Cherokees to cede more of their land. As Perdue discusses, the Cherokees were at the same time subjected to a “benevolent” effort on the part of the U.S. to “civilize” them; that is, to remake them in its image. The Cherokees willingly accommodated certain aspects of American culture, but were still forced to cede their lands in the Southeast and remove to Indian Territory in the winter of 1838–39. The Cherokees built a new nation in the West, in what is now Oklahoma, while a small number of Cherokees who had avoided removal also reorganized as a tribe and today have a reservation in western North Carolina.
