The Cherokees of North Carolina: 

 Living Memorials of the Past 



By William H. Gilbert, Jr. 



History and General Research Division 



Legislative Reference Service 



Library of Congress 



[With 8 plates] 

 THE CHEROKEE STORY 



When the first English settlers came to the shores of North America 

 they encountered a series of environmental barriers to their settlement 

 that had to be surmounted in the conquest of the continent. First the 

 Atlantic Coastal Plain, then the Piedmont above the fall line, and 

 finally the Blue Ridge loomed up as great natural features of the 

 continent's terrain requiring subjugation. Almost to the very end 

 of the Colonial period the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Mountain 

 chain constituted a certain natural and formidable limitation to the 

 horizons of expansion of the new nation then coming into existence. 



Finally, however, the Blue Ridge Mountains and their aboriginal 

 inhabitants, the Cherokee Indians, were conquered and their original 

 area and range made part of the expanding domain of the newly 

 formed republic, the United States of America. As the Scotch-Irish, 

 Germans, English, and other populations spread down from Pennsyl- 

 vania through Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and into Tennessee 

 and Kentucky, the Cherokee Indians were gradually displaced and the 

 greater bulk of them moved westward to a new home beyond the 

 Mississippi to the west of the Ozark Mountains. Only a fraction of 

 these mighty warriors remained to guard for all time the inner fast- 

 nesses of the Appalachians in the Great Smokies of our day. 



The story of the Cherokees and their homeland begins back in the 

 dim recesses of geologic history in the latter part of the Paleozoic 

 age when the Appalachian Mountains came out of the great thrusts of 

 the earth's crust and became a major feature of the earth's surface. 



Throughout the vast period of at least 10,000,000 estimated years of 

 the Paleozoic Era a gigantic land mass called "Appalachia" existed 

 along what is now the eastern coast of the United States. Its western 



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