Free Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep Page A

white man in a statesman’s black clothes, or a suspicious character on a boat with red men. Ross would have taken their view of Indians personally: it was an affront to him and to his family, particularly his mother. A man in frontier America was expected to seek redress for insults. Though Ross never challenged other men to duels, as Andrew Jackson did, he was equally jealous of his honor. Ross’s answer could have been the life he chose. Maybe he remembered the behavior of the white horsemen who confronted him along the bank of the Tennessee River. Maybe he didn’t want to be one of them.

Six
I Am Fond of Hearing That There Is a Peace
    R oss knew his Cherokee history, or at least a version of it. The Green Corn Festival, the annual event at which he had wanted to dress like an Indian as a boy, was where the history was passed from one generation to the next. Old men offered dramatic renditions of tales that they had first heard as boys.
    Until the 1790s, the Cherokee oral tradition included a migration story. The tale suggested that many generations past, the Cherokee, or
Tsalagi,
people had lived outside the Appalachians, buthad been driven by some calamity into the mountains. Cherokee elders were still repeating their story around the time of Ross’s birth, but soon stopped. It’s not clear why, although Cherokees may have noticed that white men could use such tales of past migration to suggest Indians were nomads and not really attached to their land. Ross, as an adult, simply said that Cherokees had held their land since “time immemorial.”
    This was true enough. Cherokees had lived in the southern Appalachian highlands since long before white men arrived. Their homeland centered on the Great Smoky Mountains, known for a wondrous blue haze that tinted the view of the higher slopes. A traditional Cherokee story said the mountains were created in the distant past, when theearth was new and soft, and a great buzzard flew so low that it created hills and valleys as its wings beat the ground. From these mountains, Cherokee hunting grounds stretched out as far as modern-day South Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. They were a powerful nation, often at war with the Creeks to their southwest and various nations to the north.
    Because early Cherokees were not literate, much of what is known about their history came from their encounters with Europeans. The earliest known contact came in 1540, when the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto found them well established in a string of towns. Failing to discover the gold he was seeking, de Soto and his Spanish soldiers moved on. Later the Cherokees encountered French explorers and traders, who moved inland from the Gulf Coast or down the river systems from the Great Lakes in search of furs. The most sustained contact with white settlers began after 1670, when the British established Charles Towne, or Charleston, as the capital of their new Carolina colony. The British crown granted the Carolinians a sphere of influence including most Cherokee territory.
    Day-to-day British contact with the Cherokees came through soldiers and through traders such as Ross’s Scottish ancestors. Of all the colonial traders, the most famous may have been James Adair, who lived for forty years among southern tribes before publishing a book drawn from his experience in 1775. Adair’s eyewitness observations were only partly diminished by his motivation for offering them: he wanted to demonstrate that Indian customs were similar to Jewish customs, proving the popular theory that the Indians were descendants of a lost tribe of Israel. In fairness to Adair, he could never have embraced this outlandish notion unless he had been willing to see Indians as human beings like himself. Native “persons, customs, &c. are not singular from the rest of the world,” Adair wrote. “Their notions of things are like ours.” He was a sympathetic observer. Adair recalled the Cherokees in the first part of the 1700s