376 CHEROKEE NATION OF INDIANS 
tion; that their houses, farms, and fixtures have greatly improved 
in the comforts of life; that in general they are living in double cabins 
and evincing an increasing disposition to provide for the future; that 
they have in operation eleven common schools, superintended by a na- 
tive Cherokee, in which are taught reading, writing, arithmetic, book- 
keeping, grammar, geography, and history, which are entirely supported 
at the expense of their own national funds, and which are attended by 
upwards of five hundred scholars; that the churches are largely at- 
tended and liberally supported, the Methodists having 1,400 communi- 
cants, the Baptists 750, and other denominations a smaller number ; 
that a national temperance society boasts of 1,752 members; that they 
maintain a printing press, from which publications are issued in both 
the English and Cherokee tongues; that some of them manifest a de- 
cided taste for general literature and a few have full and well selected 
libraries; that thousands of them can speak and write the English 
language with fluency and comparative accuracy; that hundreds can 
draw up contracts, deeds, and other instruments for the transfer of 
property, and that in the ordinary transactions of life, especially in 
making bargains, they are shrewd and intelligent, frequently evincing 
a remarkable degree of craft and combination ; that their treatment 
of their women had undergone a radical change ; that the countenanee 
and encouragement given to her cultivation disclosed a more exalted 
estimate of female character, and that instead of being regarded as a 
slave and a beast of burden she was now recognized as a friend and 
companion. 
Thus, with the exception of occasional drawbacks —the result of civil 
feuds—the progress of the nation in education, industry, and civiliza- 
tion continued until the outbreak of the rebellion. At this period, from 
the best attainable information, the Cherokees numbered twenty-one 
thousand souls. The events of the war brought to them more of desola- 
tion and ruin than perhaps to any other community. 
Raided and sacked alternately, not only by the Confederate and Union 
forces, but by the vindictive ferocity and hate of their own factional di- 
visions, their country became a blackened and desolate waste. Driven 
from comfortable homes, exposed to want, misery, and the elements, 
they perished like sheep in a snow storm. Their houses, fences, and 
other improvements were burned, their orchards destroyed, their flocks 
and herds slaughtered or driven off, their schools broken up, and their 
school-houses given to the flames, their churches and public buildings 
subjected to a similar fate, and that entire portion of their country 
which had been occupied by their settlements was distinguishable from 
the virgin prairie only by the scorched and blackened chimneys and 
the plowed but now neglected fields. 
The war over and the work of reconstruction commenced, found them 
numbering fourteen thousand impoverished, heart broken, and revenge- 
ful people. But they must work or starve, and in almost sullen despair 
they set about rebuilding their waste places. The situation was one 
