Free Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep

best-known portrait showed him in a formal dark suit with a vest, his hair carefully trimmed and combed back, his large eyes focused on the artist, looking every bit the youthful statesman with his right hand holding a piece of paper. He moved about the Cherokee Nation inboots and a jacket, sometimes topped by a broad-brimmed, flat-crownedplanter’s hat. Because he could have passed as a white man, his leadership skills and eloquence might well have led him to prominence, given the widening opportunities for white men in Andrew Jackson’s America. Yet something drew Ross away from the whiteside and closer to his Indian identity. Given the ability to claim membership in one of two different groups, Ross gradually strengthened his ties to the group that was smaller, more vulnerable, and seemingly destined to lose.
    He certainly prospered as a Cherokee, because he was an entrepreneur. He developed real estate in both the Cherokee and white senses of the term. Although Cherokee land was owned in common by the nation, plots could be improved by individuals, as Ross did with houses and fields and the Tennessee River settlement called Ross’s Landing. On the whiteside, Ross speculated in land as allowed by white custom,purchasing remote tracts in hopes that spreading settlement would increase their value. Ross also purchased people as slaves. Decades after Ross’s death, a ninety-six-year-old man testified to an oral historian: “My grandfather, father and Auntie were bought by John Ross.” Ross later sold the father in a trade for real estate. Ross’s slaves, like his wife and children, were very rarely discussed in his letters, although we can occasionally glimpse them. When Ross referred to “the bearer of this letter” or sending “newspapers by the bearer,” it is reasonable to imagine that the papers were carried across the Cherokee Nation in a black hand.
    Ross was wealthy enough that when he became a Cherokee leader, his political opponents questioned how he made his money. They never proved their suspicions of corruption, and the modern-day editor of Ross’s papers found no sign that Ross had dipped into the Cherokee treasury. When Ross emerged as a leading defender of Indian rights, his white critics made a darker allegation.Ross wasn’t a true Indian, they charged, but part of a mixed-blood elite who misled simple-minded Cherokees to maintain positions of personal wealth and privilege. It was certainly correct that some elites of native nations proved to beexcessively self-interested, although it is challenging to classify Ross among them. Corruptible elites commonly worked
with
white men rather than against them, trading away communal land if the government paid bribes or granted plots of land in their names. JohnRoss himself was granted 640 acres as part of a treaty with the United States in 1819. But if the land grant was meant to peel him away from the Cherokee Nation, it didn’t work. He grew more steadfast in defense of the people he regarded as his own. He persisted even after his house was taken away from him and occupied by white settlers.
    If Ross ever explained his choice, the explanation has not survived. He might have been the last to know, given the human tendency to choose a course in life and find the reasons afterward. Once he became a Cherokee leader it would have been politically awkward to admit that he ever had a chance to assume a different allegiance. But in pondering his eventual stand on the Cherokee side of the line, it is worth considering the cumulative effect of Ross’s experiences. This book began with Ross’s journey down the Tennessee River in 1812, when he was challenged from the riverbank by white horsemen. Prudence required Ross to obscure his Cherokee heritage and pass as white. This was probably not the only time he ever had to do so. He certainly encountered many people over the years who would have treated him differently depending on whether they perceived him as a