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(man speaking Native American language)
It is a story at the heart of America...
one richer and more surprising than we've been told.
(tribal drumming)
American Experience presents a story
that spans 300 years and a vast continent.
WOMAN: The greatest thing a person can have is the power.
Benegotsi. It's scary.
It is a story of hope...
courage...
and survival.
We were about to be obliterated culturally.
Our spiritual way of life,
our entire way of life, was about to be stamped out.
(roaring)
MAN: Every tribe in this country has a time of horror--
absolute horror-- when they were confronted by this invader.
MAN: What we did to the Southeastern Indians, it's ethnic cleansing.
MAN: It was done to them,
so they did it back.
But better.
MAN: Whatever means and manner we could,
since the Europeans arrived here,
we've had to fight for our survival.
An epic history of America...
(whooping)
seen through Native eyes...
too remarkable...
too inspiring...
to ever forget.
The master of life has appointed this place
for us to light our fires...
And here we shall remain.
Well, gentlemen,
I'm quite concerned.
NARRATOR: He was called Kah-nung-d-cla-geh,
"the one who goes on the mountaintop,"
or simply, "The Ridge."
In the long struggle between Indians and Americans,
few Native leaders clung to the hope
of peaceful coexistence longer.
Few others invested more in the professed protections
of the American legal system.
Few set more stock
in the promises of the American government and its Constitution.
We have accounts of education,
religion and the arts.
NARRATOR: By 1830, the Ridge had already struck a series
of hard bargains with the United States.
In return for the safety and security of the Cherokee people,
and the right to remain on the land of their forefathers,
the Ridge had taken pains to shed the life
he had been raised to.
MAJOR RIDGE (in Cherokee):
NARRATOR: He had been born in 1771,
into a Cherokee Nation that stretched
through the southern Appalachians
and had come of age in the landscape
on which the Cherokee story had been written.
The wings of the Great Buzzard had carved the mountains
and the valleys;
Uktena, the horned serpent,
had made his frightful marks on the tall rocks;
the Creator had set the first man and woman in this very place.
THEDA PERDUE: Christians had been cast out of their own Garden of Eden,
but the Cherokees lived in their Eden.
It's the land
that they believed their ancestors had always inhabited.
MAJOR RIDGE (in Cherokee):
NARRATOR: In the Ridge's youth,
the Cherokee Nation had been under constant threat.
As a young warrior, it was his duty to keep a wary eye
on any encroachment by their near neighbors--
the Shawnees, the Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws,
and then a new force in the Southeastern mountains:
the Americans.
The Cherokees picked the wrong side in the American Revolution
and paid dearly.
The Ridge watched American riflemen burn out his own town,
one of 50 they destroyed in Cherokee territory.
He lashed out, took his first American scalp at age 17
and fought the United States past the point of hope.
RUSSELL TOWNSEND: For a generation of Cherokees,
that destruction was all they knew.
They had seen their world kind of evaporate around them.
NARRATOR: The Cherokee Nation was still on its knees in 1805.
Its population had dwindled to 12,000,
and it had lost more than half its land.
(horse whinnies)
Even after the Cherokees and other tribes
had signed peace treaties with the United States,
the Ridge knew the safety of his people was not a given thing.
He understood that the central conflict still pertained--
the United States meant to have what was left
of the Cherokee homeland.
Ridge meant to save it.
But he knew that this battle with the United States required
a nimble and artful new approach.
Preserving the Cherokee Nation meant walking for a time
down the new path America was offering.
Please accept this, Brother Ridge, as a small gift.
MAJOR RIDGE (in Cherokee):
PERDUE: The United States at the end of the American Revolution
developed a policy called "civilization."
It helped fund missionary organizations
to go into the Indian nations, particularly in the South,
and teach Indians how to be Anglo Americans--
how to grow wheat instead of corn;
how to eat meals at regular times
instead of when they were hungry;
how to dress in European clothing;
how to speak the English language;
how to pray in church at designated times;
how to live the kind of life
that Anglo Americans believed was a civilized life.
GAYLE ROSS: The promises of the United States government
were that if the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Choctaws,
the Seminoles,
the Chickasaws could somehow assimilate ways of living
that were more like their white neighbors
that they could be the political and social equal
of their white neighbors.
Literally Thomas Jefferson once assured the Indian leaders
in a speech that he believed
they could become the equal of white people.
NARRATOR: "You will unite yourselves with us,"
President Jefferson said,
"join our great councils and form one people with us.
"And we shall all be Americans.
"You will mix with us by marriage.
"Your blood will run within our veins
and will spread with us over this great continent."
(speaking Cherokee)
DANIEL ROSS: John, Flintlock.
NARRATOR: John Ross, the future Cherokee chief,
grew up at the crossroads of an emerging world
where white settlers and Indians were just beginning
a strange new dance of accommodation.
(speaking Cherokee)
John's mother Mollie, a member of the Bird clan,
had married a Scotsman, Daniel Ross.
Ross was among the growing number of white men
who took Cherokee wives, and gained access to land and trade
in the bargain.
John?
GAYLE ROSS: There would have been many different classes of Cherokee
making their way in and out of the store,
from full-blood traditional people
to the wealthier mixed-blood families
that were just beginning to establish themselves.
(speaking Cherokee)
NARRATOR: The Rosses spoke English at home;
John had English-speaking tutors.
But John Ross was a Cherokee because of his mother's blood,
an accepted member of the Bird clan.
He grew up surrounded by people
whose lives ran to traditional Cherokee rhythms.
He was proud to have a Cherokee name, "Koo-wees-koo-wee,"
or "Mysterious Little White Bird."
John?
GAYLE ROSS: There's a story that's told about the time when he was five.
And his father had bought a new little suit for him to wear
at the time of Green Corn Dance.
And his mother dressed him up in his white man's suit.
And the other children teased him so unmercifully
that supposedly he came back home
and insisted on being allowed to change into the everyday clothes
of the other Cherokee children
before he would go back out and join the festivities.
(sticks clacking together)
NARRATOR: Cherokee land-- all of it--
was owned in common by the tribe,
but any Cherokee could work and improve
as much land as personal energy and private resources allowed.
And the Ridge and his wife, Susannah,
were energetic and resourceful homesteaders;
exemplars of "civilization."
As the years went by and the Ridge's farming wealth grew,
U.S. agents would occasionally receive optimistic reports
from the Ridge family.
Major Ridge, as he was now called,
knew what they wanted to hear.
"I take pleasure to state that every head of his household
"has his house and farm.
"The poorer class very contentedly perform
"the duties of the kitchen.
"They sew, they weave, they spin, they cook our meals
and act well."
Major Ridge's hope for the future
was a group of educated young men
who could build a strong new Cherokee Nation,
reckon U.S. laws and government
and outsmart federal negotiators who were after their land.
His greatest hope was his own son.
John Ridge was a frail boy, hampered by a disease
that occasionally made it difficult to walk,
but the Major recognized his son's strengths.
When the U.S. War Department offered to pay tuition
for John and his cousin,
Elias Boudinot, at a missionary school in Connecticut,
Major Ridge grabbed the chance.
RIDGE (in Cherokee):
SUSANNAH RIDGE (in Cherokee):
ELIAS BOUDINOT: So, I read your essay.
NARRATOR: John Ridge grew to manhood among white Christian educators,
absorbing the lessons of the Bible
and the U.S. Constitution alike.
Even 900 miles away from Cherokee Territory,
he never betrayed a hint of pain
at his separation from home and family.
JACE WEAVER: Even from his earliest school days,
John Ridge is described by his teachers as being cold,
a little bit aloof, as being haughty.
They compare him to his cousin, Buck,
who became Elias Boudinot, who was much friendlier,
much more congenial, but not as good a student.
John Ridge was brilliant.
NARRATOR: The faculty selected John Ridge,
out of all the Indian students at Cornwall,
to prepare an essay for President James Monroe.
In it, he sang the praises of his Christian benefactors
and his own parents.
"My father and mother are both ignorant of the English language,
"but it is astonishing to see them exert all their power
to have their children educated, like the whites."
For all his scholarly achievements,
John Ridge's fragile health failed
in the New England winters.
He spent much of his time in his room,
attended by the school steward's daughter, Sarah Bird Northrup,
until a doctor alerted her mother
that the two seemed to have fallen in love.
When Sarah confessed, the Northrups sent her away
to live with relatives, the entire affair kept secret.
It took nearly two years, but John won over Sarah's parents.
He regained his health, qualified as a lawyer,
and promised to take care of their daughter.
MINISTER: Do you thus solemnly and sincerely engage and promise?
I will, with the help of God.
MINISTER: And you, Miss Sarah Bird Northrup,
with your right hand,
take Mr. John Ridge by his right hand.
In the presence of God
and these witnesses, (clamoring outside)
do take John Ridge, whom you now hold by the hand,
to be your wedded husband,
to have and to hold from this day forward.
Cherish and keep him in sickness and in health
and forsaking all others, keep only unto him,
conducting yourself toward him in all respects...
(minister's voice becomes distant, crowd clamoring louder)
This marriage is a sin in God's eyes!
(din of protestors grows louder)
Go!
WEAVER: The reaction of New England whites--
enlightened, progressive New England whites--
makes a mark on him.
He had been told, "Get an education,
take up Western ways, you can be part of us."
He will never believe whites in exactly the same way again.
JOHN RIDGE (dramatized): An Indian is almost considered accursed.
The scum of the earth are considered sacred in comparison.
If an Indian is educated...
yet he is an Indian,
and the most stupid and illiterate white man
will disdain and triumph over this worthy individual.
NARRATOR: While John Ridge was away in Connecticut,
John Ross was a young man on the rise.
A trader like his father, Ross cashed in selling food
and provisions to the well-funded Christian missions
sprouting around the Cherokee Nation.
He married a Cherokee woman
and made a home on 420 prime planting acres.
But Ross was drawn more and more
into the troubled state of Cherokee diplomacy.
The Cherokee Nation's long alliance with the United States
was fraying.
Washington was dragging its feet on payments
owed under the terms of earlier treaties
and strong-arming the Cherokees to sell off more territory.
The Cherokee Nation had formed
a powerful new central government to push back,
determined never again to cede one more foot of land.
And they needed able English- speaking men--
like John Ross--
to articulate the Cherokee position
to the United States government.
WEAVER: John Ross was not from a prominent Cherokee family
the way John Ridge was.
But Ridge takes John Ross kind of under his wing as a protégé.
Here in John Ross he's got someone
who's only an eighth Cherokee,
is very familiar with white society because of his father,
equally adept at negotiating both of those worlds.
...much like yours.
NARRATOR: With strong leaders like Ross and the Ridges,
the Cherokees could hold the United States government
to its word for a while,
but the situation on the ground was changing nonetheless.
As dreams of cotton wealth drove prospective planters
deep into the interior South,
other tribes were giving up huge swaths of neighboring lands.
The 14,000 Cherokees found themselves surrounded
on every side by American settlers;
scores of whites began to scrabble onto Cherokee farmland.
A small group of Cherokees had already taken America up
on its offer of new land west of the Mississippi,
in Arkansas Territory.
But the Cherokee National Council, to a man,
was still confident it had the strength to stand its ground.
Major Ridge, for one, had much to defend:
nearly 10 million acres owned in common by the tribe,
and his own plantation.
According to the U.S. Superintendent of Indian Affairs,
Ridge's farm "was in a higher state of cultivation
"and his buildings better than those of any other person
in that region, the whites not excepted."
In 20 years, Ridge had cleared nearly 300 acres for cash crops:
cotton, tobacco, wheat and indigo.
He oversaw his own orchard, dairy and vineyard
and as many as 30 slaves.
(speaking Cherokee)
JOHN ROSS: John Ross owned slaves
and John Ridge, when he got married,
Major Ridge gave him like 20 slaves.
And so he was a slave owner also.
WEAVER: About eight percent of Cherokees owned slaves.
They were mainly the mixed-blood elite.
But more and more,
that mixed-blood elite is adopting the lifestyle
of the Southern planter culture.
...tobacco in the past
that we're thinking of adding to that,
or perhaps even some cattle.
(speaking Cherokee)
My father says the rains were heavy here
and the cotton was planted late,
but cotton prices are rising again.
(speaking Cherokee)
(laughter)
My father apologizes to you, ma'am.
He says the cost of your fine dresses is going up.
(laughter)
NARRATOR: Not all Cherokees welcomed these new opportunities.
"Civilization" was beginning to draw hard class distinctions
that had never existed in traditional Cherokee society.
The lives of most full-blood Cherokees were still marked
by loss.
What little remained of their old hunting grounds
was played out.
They depended almost entirely on subsistence farming.
And they worried that their leaders were in thrall
to the ways of the whites.
But there were still elemental ties that bound all Cherokees,
and change that benefited all,
including a signal advance by a Cherokee named Sequoyah.
GAYLE ROSS: Sequoyah was devoted to enabling the Cherokee people
to have at their command an essential power
that he saw white society have,
that being the ability to write in the Cherokee language.
Ultimately he did something that no one has ever done,
and that was create a system of reading and writing
in a language when he himself could not read or write
in any other language.
CHIEF CHAD SMITH: There was one character for every syllable.
So with 86 syllables a Cherokee speaker could learn to write
in several weeks.
And it's actually much more efficient and effective
than you could ever ask of English.
GAYLE ROSS: Within a matter of a few years,
the Cherokee Nation was literate.
The Cherokee Phoenix;
the translation of the Bible into Cherokee;
family stories were written down;
medicine people wrote down all of their formulas for healing.
It literally revolutionized Cherokee society.
NARRATOR: At the end of the 1820s,
Major Ridge saw a new Cherokee Nation on the rise.
Cherokee population grew every year.
Its National Council was stronger than ever
and a new generation had come of age.
John Ridge had taken a seat on the Council.
And one of the most impressive new young leaders was John Ross.
John Ross, he didn't look like a real full-blood Cherokee,
but the full-bloods, the Cherokee people, trusted him.
He was what they looked for in a leader,
and he was in for the common people.
NARRATOR: Among the traditional full-blood Cherokees--
who made up the overwhelming majority of the tribe--
John Ross gained a reputation for integrity.
While serving under the principal chief,
Ross had become an eager student of the abiding Cherokee ways.
It was Ross who authored a new constitution
that all Cherokees could embrace.
Ross's constitution created
a democratically elected government
mirrored on the United States.
There was an executive, a legislative
and a judicial branch.
A strong National Council was vested with the power
to protect all Cherokee land.
CAREY TILLEY: This is the culmination.
This is the culmination of a movement
and is probably the greatest unity
that the Cherokee people had ever seen.
NARRATOR: The new constitution drew bright and indisputable borders
around Cherokee territory,
and declared the Cherokee Nation's absolute sovereignty
within those borders.
WEAVER: Georgia reacts to the Cherokee passage of a constitution
in 1827 very badly.
They say, "If they set up a constitutional government,
we'll never be able to get rid of them."
NARRATOR: "The absolute title to the lands in controversy is in Georgia,"
read one resolution, "and she may rightfully possess herself
of them when, and by what means, she pleases."
"These misguided men,"
a state legislator said of the Cherokees,
"should be taught that there is no alternative
"between their removal beyond the limits
"of the state of Georgia
and their extinction."
(rooster crows)
(man singing in Cherokee)
NARRATOR: As the Georgia legislature began to kick back,
other, more ominous events, were unfolding...
The discovery of gold in Cherokee territory,
which caused a stampede of white prospectors,
and the first stirring of a populist political movement
that sent tremors through Indian lands all over the East.
This hard-edged new movement found voice in Andrew Jackson,
whose ascent to the presidency in 1829
owed to the newly enfranchised Southern frontiersmen.
In his first address to Congress,
President Jackson announced his intention
to do as his voters pleased,
which is to say rid the East of the Indian tribes
once and for all.
He championed new legislation
giving him power to offer the tribes
land west of the Mississippi... if they would go nicely.
GAYLE ROSS: The Indian removal bill
was Jackson's first priority once he was in office.
It became the first major focus of his administration.
It did reflect a fundamental shift
in the way that America was beginning to define itself.
Not very many people in Georgia and Tennessee,
Alabama, at that time,
were willing to even go so far as to say
that Indian people were people.
TILLEY: The thinking of the day becomes more racist,
that the Cherokees are inferior and cannot be like the whites.
It's convenient rhetoric to say that Cherokees are inferior
and we need to get them out of the way, out of harm's way,
as Jackson would put it.
NARRATOR: Other tribes read the bleak signs
and reluctantly began to prepare for removal.
But the Cherokees reached out for support among their friends
and benefactors along the Eastern seaboard.
WEAVER: The Cherokees were one of the "civilized" tribes.
They had made such strides.
So they cut a sympathetic figure to Northeasterners.
I ask you--
shall red men live, or shall they be swept from the earth?
It is with you, and this public at large,
the decision chiefly rests.
Must they perish?
Will you push them from you or will you save them?
NARRATOR: The Congressional debate over the Indian removal bill
was a sectional brawl that drew the entire country's attention.
A campaign organized by Benevolent Ladies
flooded Congress with pro-Indian letters and petitions.
"Who can look an Indian in the face," one senator thundered,
"and say to him, 'For more than 40 years we have made to you
"'the most solemn of promises;
"'we now violate and trample upon them all,
but offer you, in their stead, another guarantee.'"
New England senators voted 11-1 against Jackson's removal bill.
But the unanimous bloc of Southerners
assured its passage in the Senate.
The vote was closer in the House-- 102 to 97.
But the legislation passed.
And President Andrew Jackson's signature made Indian removal
the law of the land.
TILLEY: The state of Georgia basically said to its citizens,
"This land is yours."
They divided up with the land lottery
and basically told their people to have at it.
NARRATOR: While white settlers bought up lottery tickets
and a chance at Cherokee land,
the Georgia legislature bent itself to obliterating the state
within its state,
passing new laws overriding Cherokee sovereignty.
Meetings of the Cherokee legislature
and courts were deemed illegal.
All people residing on Cherokee land
were now subject to Georgia law.
Missionaries who had lived among the Cherokees for years
were forced to sign oaths of allegiance to Georgia.
Those who refused were jailed.
(gavel bangs)
JOHN ROSS: And Jackson basically told Cherokees
that he couldn't do anything about it.
It was state rights.
And, you know, they couldn't have any protection
from the federal government.
The only way they were going to get protection
was if they moved.
NARRATOR: Making a plan to battle Andrew Jackson and Georgia
fell to the Cherokees' newly elected principal chief.
Major Ridge had decided not to run for the office,
asserting that the Cherokees would be best served
by an English-speaking chief.
His own son was too young, so the Ridge backed John Ross.
At 38, Ross himself was barely eligible,
but he won election easily.
And one of his first acts in office--
rewriting the blood law-- sent a clear signal:
any Cherokee who made a deal to sell land to the United States
without the consent of the entire tribe
faced dire and certain consequences.
"Citizens of this nation," the law read,
"may kill him or them so offending,
in any manner most convenient."
Chief Ross then set out to shame Jackson
and the supporters of Indian removal,
and he was going to use the United States federal courts to do it.
Along with America's most esteemed advocate--
former attorney general William Wirt--
Ross and his closest advisers began to frame
the Cherokees' argument for self-determination
in their own territory.
CHEROKEE LEADER (in Cherokee):
NARRATOR: The Cherokee Nation and their supporters
filed more than a dozen separate suits in federal court;
two made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.
The question in both cases was the flash point
of American politics in 1830.
Where did federal authority end and states' rights begin?
Did federal treaties with the Cherokee Nation
supersede Georgia state law?
Or could Georgia do as she pleased within her borders?
The Court dodged the question in the first case,
but in the second, Worcester v. Georgia, it could not.
Samuel Worcester,
a missionary who lived in the Cherokee Nation,
had been jailed by Georgia officials for refusing
to take an oath of allegiance.
Wirt argued that his arrest was unconstitutional,
that Cherokee tribal laws could not be written over
by the state of Georgia.
The opinion of the Court,
written by Chief Justice John Marshall,
could not have been more clear.
"The Cherokee nation is a distinct community,"
Marshall wrote, "occupying its own territory,
"with boundaries accurately described,
"in which the laws of Georgia can have no force,
"and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter
but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves."
SMITH: What else could you ask for
but a very clear and sympathetic order
of the highest court in the land
interpreting the supreme law of the land.
The Cherokees just were ecstatic.
GAYLE ROSS: They followed the law.
They followed this policy
of a government-to-government relationship.
And the Supreme Court decision was a complete vindication.
WEAVER: Now, finally, this is their victory.
Now they'll have some protection.
NARRATOR: John Ridge was still in Washington when he got word
that the state of Georgia was refusing to recognize
the Supreme Court decision
or the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation.
WEAVER: He goes to the White House
and gets an audience with President Jackson.
He asked him bluntly if he will force Georgia to comply
with the Supreme Court's order,
and Jackson says he will not.
GAYLE ROSS: Andrew Jackson,
the only president in the history of the United States
to openly defy a Supreme Court order.
He is said to have remarked
that Chief Justice Marshall made his decision,
let him enforce it.
And to the Georgians he said, "Light a fire under them.
They'll move."
It's over.
He wants us gone.
Even those we call friends say we can't resist anymore.
MAJOR RIDGE (in Cherokee):
SMITH: The political reality is setting in.
The issues became more clear.
You could stay and fight or stay and resist or leave.
And it was a very painful decision.
It was an emotional decision.
It was the United States driving us intentionally
into that choice.
(speaking Cherokee)
NARRATOR: Once Jackson had openly sided with Georgia,
every day brought fresh stories of Cherokees being whipped,
run from their farms, and even killed by white Georgians;
and the Cherokee Nation didn't have the strength to fight them off.
When the United States renewed its offer of a cash settlement
for Cherokee territory and a grant of land
west of the Mississippi, the Ridges were ready to listen.
TILLEY: At this point, the Ridges see the yielding of land
as inevitable.
What it's coming down to in their minds
is a choice between preserving their land
or preserving their sovereignty.
So they believe it's more important
to remain a sovereign nation
and distance themselves from the threat that's imminent.
JOHN RIDGE: I'm told it is much like here.
We will come to think of it as home.
(in Cherokee):
Well, it is far.
Too far for others, but not for us.
They would have us leave our land,
and take up way out to the west, here.
(in Cherokee):
NARRATOR: John Ross was a man in the middle.
He knew where the people stood,
but the Ridges were Cherokee aristocracy,
esteemed leaders in the Nation.
The family had plenty of friends in the U.S. government.
And Ross was not happy that John Ridge
was preparing to run against him for principal chief
in the upcoming tribal elections.
This infighting, Ross believed, invited peril.
He'd seen federal negotiators divide and conquer
the leadership of every other nearby tribe.
Unity, he knew, had been the Cherokees' salvation;
the tribe had to speak to the United States with one voice.
TOWNSEND: I think he heard the traditional voice
and felt compelled by it, felt a sense of duty to it.
Certainly he had 16,000 people telling him to stay.
I think he wanted to do
what those voices were telling him to do.
TILLEY: The Ridges kept saying publicly,
"If we could just talk to the Cherokee people,
then we could convince them that this is our only option."
And they felt like John Ross was being heavy handed
in keeping them from speaking as openly as they'd like to.
NARRATOR: "The duty of the minority to yield and unite
is sanctioned by patriotism and virtue," Ross proclaimed.
Then, citing a national emergency,
he suspended the upcoming tribal elections.
WEAVER: When John Ross cancels elections,
now there's a real block to John Ridge
ever assuming what he knows to be his rightful position.
He sees John Ross as a dictator
and he grows to hate the man in a very visceral way.
NARRATOR: The United States and Georgia got the scent of blood
and dug deep at the rift that had opened
between Chief Ross and the Ridges.
Federal agents kept close contact with members
of the Ridge faction and let it be known among all Cherokees.
Ross's allies fanned rumors
that the Ridges were illegally negotiating away Cherokee land
and reminded the Ridge Party
that the penalty for selling land
without the consent of the tribe
was death.
By the time the tribal leaders gathered
for an emergency session at the Red Clay Council Grounds
in the summer of 1834,
John Ross had taken aim at his old friend, Major Ridge.
(gavel bangs)
My fellow countrymen,
the matter before us is most urgent.
If the United States shall withdraw
their solemn pledges of protection,
deprive us of the right of self-government
and wrest from us our land,
then, in deep anguish of our misfortune,
we may justly say there is no place for us.
(audience clamors)
No confidence left that the United States shall be more
just and faithful towards us
in the barren prairies of the west
than when we occupied the soil
inherited from the Great Author of our existence.
(audience clamors)
MAJOR RIDGE (in Cherokee):
(all talking at once)
My father has, with distinguished zeal and ability,
served his country.
(audience shouting in Cherokee)
Is a man to be denounced for his opinion?
(audience shouting)
If a man saw a cloud charged with rain and thunder
and urged the people to take care,
is that man to be hated
or respected?
(audience shouting)
WEAVER: There's a lengthy discussion
and it's decided to impeach John Ridge, Major Ridge,
from the National Council.
Amidst all of this, a member of the Ridge faction,
John Walker Jr., leaves early.
(owl hoots)
And he is bushwhacked.
His body is left out on the road as a signal.
TILLEY: It's not just rhetoric anymore.
People have to fear for their lives.
NARRATOR: There was no reconciling after Red Clay.
John Ross insisted that if the Cherokees held tight,
they could outlast the Jackson administration.
A new president would surely honor
the Supreme Court decision.
The Ridges believed that what was left of American tolerance
for Indian people was evaporating fast.
It was time for the Cherokee leaders to take
the best cash offer from Washington
and get their people to safety west of the Mississippi.
In the last days of 1835,
in defiance of Chief Ross and the National Council,
a self-appointed group of Cherokee leaders met
at the home of Elias Boudinot.
In front of them was the newly negotiated Treaty of New Echota.
In return for ceding all the tribal lands in the Southeast,
the Cherokee Nation would be paid five million dollars,
providing funds to relocate west of the Mississippi
and to build schools, churches and homes in their new land.
The treaty party did not stand to benefit financially,
but they knew that would be little comfort
to their fellow citizens.
WEAVER: None of them were under any illusions
as to what they were doing.
They knew it was contrary to the wishes
of the majority of Cherokees.
They knew that they had no authority to sign that treaty.
They all knew that.
GAYLE ROSS: To a large extent
they had come to believe what they had been telling themselves
from the time of the Worcester decision.
"We see.
"We're the ones who know.
"We're the ones who have to take action
to protect these people who don't understand."
It must have been a very heavy load
knowing that the vast majority of Cherokee people
would see them as traitors and worthy of the death penalty.
(sobbing)
MAJOR RIDGE (in Cherokee):
NARRATOR: Soon after the Treaty of New Echota was ratified
in the United States Senate-- by a margin of just one vote--
Major Ridge and his son, John, left their homes
and moved to the land west of the Mississippi
to establish a new Cherokee Nation.
The Ridges were going the way of other tribes around them--
the Creeks, the Choctaws and the Chickasaws.
But less than 2,000 of the 18,000 Cherokee citizens
joined the Ridges in their journey west.
TILLEY: The people are told they have two years
to remove themselves peacefully
with support from the federal government--
supply them and make sure that they get their payments.
And only a handful of people leave.
They continue planting their fields
and making improvements on their farms.
That was their land; they weren't going to leave.
(woman speaking Cherokee)
SMITH: For the vast majority of the Cherokee people,
removal was not an option.
It just was not.
They couldn't comprehend removal.
They couldn't comprehend that a handful of people
signing a piece of paper would be enough to remove them
from their homelands.
WEAVER: John Ross is trying to hold the Nation together,
to keep it in place.
He's desperately seeking a way, any possible way,
that the Cherokees can remain in the East.
I need your help.
A paper will come soon.
Please sign it.
You can trust me to fight this.
NARRATOR: The Cherokee chief knew he was working against time.
Deadline for removal was May 1838,
and 7,000 federal troops had ringed Cherokee territory.
White settlers began to close the circle, "Like vultures,"
said one federal officer, "ready to strip the Cherokees
of everything they have."
Still John Ross had faith
in the common decency of white Americans.
He thought the Ridges' narrowly ratified treaty
could be overturned, and he took one last shot,
authoring a bold statement from the Cherokee Nation--
in the form of a written petition--
to be laid before the United States Senate.
"We acknowledge our own feebleness,"
the Cherokees said.
"Our only fortress is the justice of our cause.
Our only appeal on earth is to your tribunal."
The petition arrived at Ross's hotel in Washington
just weeks before the removal deadline;
it had been signed by 15,665 people--
virtually every Cherokee in the East.
SMITH: There were some sheets that were blue;
some were white; some were almost orange; some were long;
some were wide.
And they sewed those all together in a scroll.
And if you laid those out they'd be over 160 feet long.
And John Ross had prepared for one of the Cherokees' friends
in the Senate to place that upon the table in the Senate--
that protest--
so they would reconsider the execution of that treaty.
And before that senator could present it,
a congressman from Kentucky and one from Maine had a duel.
Then one killed the other.
And Congress adjourned.
NARRATOR: While a frustrated John Ross waited out
the Congressional recess that followed the killing,
he wrote home to his sister-in-law,
"As soon as they bury their illustrious brother,
"Congress can get back to the business of dealing
with us savages."
Congress, however, did not circle back
to Chief Ross's petition; it was simply pushed aside.
The Cherokee people's near-unanimous plea
never received the consideration of the United States Senate.
On the morning of May 26, 1838--
three days after the removal deadline--
federal troops and state militia began
what they called the assembly of the Cherokee people.
Everyone has to leave.
Everyone has to go right now.
TOM BELT: Everything that wasn't actually on the person
now belonged to the state.
And they were forced out into yards and onto the roads
with whatever they had on their back.
MILITIAMAN: Come on Reverend, get 'em loose.
GAYLE ROSS: There were staging areas around the Cherokee Nation
with wooden stockades,
and the people were herded into what were literally cattle pens.
Come on, keep moving.
NARRATOR: A few weeks after the roundup began,
the first detachments of Cherokees were shipped west
under military guard.
Word quickly got back to the stockades:
drought and summer disease had made the trip a march of death.
Chief Ross was frantic to avoid further loss.
He convinced U.S. military officials
to let him take over the organization
and supply of removal,
and to let his people sit tight until fall,
after the season of disease had passed.
A few hundred Cherokees
who agreed to renounce tribal citizenship
were allowed to remain on their farms in North Carolina.
The rest, more than 12,000 captive Cherokees,
waited in the fetid stockades.
"Prisoners," one missionary remembered,
"were obliged to lie at night on the naked ground,
"in the open air, exposed to wind and rain, and in this way,
"many are hastening to a premature grave.
"Half the infants and all the aged have died directly,
and one fourth of the remainder."
Through June, July, August and September they waited
until, at the beginning of October,
the Cherokee Nation was finally pushed west.
It was early December
before the final group began the 850-mile trip.
By then, the long line of Cherokee travelers stretched
from Illinois into Kentucky,
unbroken in places for three miles.
John Ross had seen that the detachments were well supplied
for the three- to four-month trek,
but winter storms made the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers impassable,
stranding thousands for a full month.
GAYLE ROSS: No one could have predicted that one of the hardest winters
in memory would strike that year.
When they reached the Mississippi River,
the river was frozen.
There were three different detachments trapped
between the Mississippi and another river frozen behind them.
And there they sat
for weeks in deep, deep snow and ice.
As long as they were moving maybe it wasn't so bad.
But when you actually had to wait for the ice
and sit there and maybe you're sleeping on snow
but you're probably sleeping on melted mud
and you're sick, your baby's sick,
your grandmother's sick
and there's nothing you can do about it.
(coughing)
NARRATOR: The harsh weather so slowed progress
that supplies of dried corn and salt pork began to run short;
when white settlers along the road
recognized the Cherokees' need, a few offered help.
Others took the opportunity to cash in on the woe,
charging wildly inflated prices for grain.
Cherokee men were soon too depleted to hunt wild game.
A New Englander passing through western Kentucky
noted the sad procession.
"Two thousand people sick and feeble, many near death.
"One woman was carrying her youngest child,
"who was dying in her arms.
"Multitudes go on foot.
"Even aged females were traveling with heavy burdens
"attached to their back, on sometimes frozen ground
"with no covering for the feet
"except what nature had given them.
The Indians buried 14 or 15 at every stopping place."
WEAVER: Because of the civilization project,
a great many of those coming on the trail were Christians.
And a lot of times on the trail they would sing Christian hymns.
Here these thousands of people making this forced march,
one quarter of them dying en route,
and they're singing, "Guide me oh thou great Jehovah,
"guide me, God, pilgrim that I am in this barren land.
"I am weak and you are mighty.
Guide us."
TOWNSEND: The United States gained a lot of land
and farms and taverns and ferries and things like that.
But a loss for the American government is the blemish,
the stain it places upon our national honor.
What we did in the 1830s to the Southeastern Indians,
it's ethnic cleansing.
THOMAS BELT: The removal had caused the deaths of some 4,000 people.
Someone had to answer for that,
someone had to answer for those lives.
A life taken in that way must be balanced out.
(screaming)
WEAVER: They stabbed him repeatedly.
They beat him.
Took turns kicking the body and jumping up and down,
caving in his chest.
JOHN ROSS: The same morning, four men came to Elias Boudinot
and asked for medicine.
And as he turned to greet the people, he was stabbed.
And another used a hatchet to the head.
(gunshots)
Major Ridge was shot five times and he was killed.
Three murders in the same day.
Three outstanding people.
The Cherokee people, we lost them, brilliant minds, that day.
And I think it was a loss for the whole Nation.
NARRATOR: There was no easy balm for the wounds caused by removal;
angry talk, bitter accusation and violent reprisal flared
among the Cherokees for the next 30 years.
It fell to John Ross,
who retained the office of principal chief,
to heal his Nation,
to realize the dream he and the Ridges had always shared:
the continuation of a strong and sovereign Cherokee Nation.
By 1860, after a quarter century at remove
from the United States,
Ross had managed to restore the heart of his Nation.
Its government had been reconstituted;
its businesses flourished; it had the finest system
of public education in all America, for men and women.
Cherokee population had nearly doubled to 21,000.
Ancient tribal traditions like the Green Corn Dance
and the clan system were still honored.
John Ross was in his 70s, had been chief nearly 40 years,
when, after the Civil War,
the United States began to force its way, once again,
into Cherokee territory,
demanding the tribe cede part of its western lands.
In the summer of 1866,
while he was in Washington negotiating anew with the U.S.,
John Ross fell ill.
As he neared death, Ross knew the Cherokee Nation
faced big challenges in the coming years--
and new kinds of encroachments.
But the chief took comfort in the fact
that the Cherokees had re-established themselves
as a strong and sovereign nation,
deeply connected to the land on which they lived
and prepared to fight for it.
WEAVER: In this one respect they're lucky...
in that where they came to looks kind of like where they left.
They look at the hills here and they say,
"Those look like the hills in old Cherokee country.
"They must have been carved out
by the same buzzard that carved out the Smokies."
And they look at the scratches in the rock
and they say, "Those look just like the scratches in the rock
"made by the Uktena back in Georgia.
They must have been made by the Uktena here, too."
Part-Cherokee writer Scott Momaday talks about
stories in the blood, or memory in the blood.
Stories are told generation after generation
so that in many ways they are carried in our blood.
And although I don't know what it was like to make that march,
my ancestors did come on the trail.
I've heard the stories.
GAYLE ROSS: In listening to the stories of your ancestors,
you're taught who you are
and what your ancestors sacrificed
so that you could be Cherokee.
Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org