Trail of Tears, by John Ehle

Or, The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. Trail of Tears describes the historical event known by that name, the removal of the Cherokee people in 1838 from their homeland in the South East of America, to what was then known as Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, West of the Mississippi.

John Ehle's book was published in 1988, so in some ways it really isn't that old; but I must have bought it not long after. At any rate, it's been sitting on my bookshelf for a very long time. Browsed through a few times, that's all. I have a number of books about the Cherokee and their history - as a people they're rather better documented than most other indigenous American nations - and with a renewed interest in the topic I thought this volume would be a good place to start.

So, why have I been putting off reading the book properly? I think it's partly because I may have felt I knew the basics of the story already, and partly because I understood it as a story of genocide which would offer only unrelenting grimness. I wasn't entirely wrong in those assumptions, but reading it has opened my eyes to many things which diverged from them. It's fair to say I didn't really know the story as well as I thought.

As to the genocide - leaving aside the question of whether modern Americans think they had conducted a genocide - but pointing out that the villains of the story, such men as John Sevier in Tennessee and Wilson Lumpkin in Georgia, were completely gung ho about the prospect of eliminating the 'Indians' entirely; I'd been biased by my knowledge of the Armenian genocide of 1915, the core part of which involved driving the Armenians of Eastern Anatolia into the Syrian desert. There was little pretence then that any Armenians would survive. I admit I assumed that the Trail of Tears was a similar process, but this time deliberately forcing the Cherokee along the trail during the harshest conditions of winter.

I now know that the passage West occurred at that time largely through the poor leadership of certain Cherokee, specifically John Ross. And that they went by land, making painfully slow progress along the muddy trail, because of deep seated prejudice against using the rivers. Water transport had been offered, indeed, John Ross took advantage of it himself. Secondly, there's the question of how many died. I don't feel confident in giving a figure, either of the size of the entire Cherokee nation, or of those who died on the Trail. Maybe it will become clearer as I read other books, but at the moment I take away a sense that it was possibly a couple of thousand, out of a total of up to 20,000. 

That last figure may surprise you, as it did me. It's true that the numbers of indigenous peoples in North America collapsed in some areas when Europeans arrived, but in the case of the Cherokee, there may never have been many more than that. By the Nineteenth Century, the whites (and blacks) greatly outnumbered the tribal peoples whose land it was, so they were never really in a good position to keep the settlers out. Before most Cherokee had even seen any whites, lines had already been drawn on the map, and land the Cherokee thought was theirs, was split between Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. Forward thinking Cherokees, who were usually half bloods, were driving development of Cherokee lands away from hunting and superstition (most game had disappeared anyway) toward agriculture and education, but the prospect of civilised Indians so appalled the settlers, especially in Georgia, that laws were enacted which denied them any rights, even to their own property. The discovery of gold on Indian land in Georgia was the final blow.

I must apologise, because I've done precisely what I didn't intend to do, which is to discuss the history, rather than the book. Maybe it's a compliment, in that the book is engaging and tells the story effectively and well. I found it very readable. The author John Ehle struck just the right balance, it seems to me, being detached while letting the reader feel the impact of events. The ends of the spectrum are extreme: crucial scenes take place in the salons of Washington, when those civilised half bloods, Major Ridge and his son John, Elias Boudinot, David Vann, John Ross et al, plead their case to the President and others. Others take place in the towns of Cherokee country, where farms and mills (and even a printing press, producing a newspaper and other texts in both English and Cherokee, using Sequoyah's newly invented writing system) are appearing, but also the old ways are strongly in evidence, conducted by the shamans. As their society falls apart, and then even as they begin to create a new home in Oklahoma, brutal killings are never far away.

I emphasise the balance that Ehle successfully strikes. The thing is, you naturally wonder what sources could there have been, let alone what sources survived, to describe all this. We rely very much on the writings of those civilised half bloods, in particular John Ridge and Boudinot, and probably most of all on the writings of the various missionaries who endeavoured (with varying agendas and degrees of self interest) to improve the situation of the Cherokee. There could have been a jarring discontinuity between what he derived from those sources, and what he derived from modern research, and again what he's been obliged to write to 'fill in the gaps'. These are quite disparate things, but I feel he did well to weld it into a story which flowed naturally. What he writes impressionistically, to convey the Cherokee's perception of their world, I felt was wholy justified and successful.

Their gaining access to literacy in a very short time was remarkable (Sequoyah is an enigmatic figure but Ehle renders his story tellingly in a few short passages). I admit in the past I've told people, 'You know, the Cherokee became literate practically overnight thanks to Sequoyah's syllabary etc...' The cold facts are that literacy only came to a small portion of the Cherokee, and I'd guess might have been yet another factor dividing the half bloods, who were pushing hard for modernisation, from the majority full bloods, who were under the influence of the shamans.

I have to be cautious about something else: Ehle does tend to take sides. No, not between the settlers and the Cherokee, that would be crass. But between two bitterly opposed parties, known as the Ridge and Ross parties. I've glanced into one or two other books already and was surprised to find a significantly different take on the actions of those figures. It seems weird to find two supposedly objective historians capable of this after nearly two centuries. One might think that none of it mattered, the Cherokee were always going to be removed and reduced. However, it's hard not to think that different actions might have led to a better, less grievous outcome. You see, John Ehle makes Ridge the protagonist of his story. Though a half blood, he grew up a warrior, and never really learnt English. But he determined that modernisation was the only chance the Cherokee had of being taken seriously, hence the education of his impressive son John. Both were powerful orators. But they were unable to make much impression on the shamans, who were determined to stick it out. John Ross, on the other hand, seems to have been adept at saying what the poorer Cherokees wanted to hear (and also adept at doing deals financially beneficial to himself), but with poor judgement about what favours he could win from Washington or the Georgians. He is the 'hero' of at least one other volume I've seen. Apparently he knew nothing about the cruel assassinations of the Ridge party.

I can't know how much my understanding of the Cherokee's history will broaden and change as I continue my reading. But I'm very glad I read this book first. Ehle writes very well in my view, and with unsentimental sympathy for a people who just might have come out of the trauma of European settlement with more of their nationhood intact. His book ends with the assassinations. I'll learn about the further reduction of the Cherokee in the 19th and 20th Centuries in other books.

PS - What on earth is Andrew Jackson doing on one of the most used notes of the nation's currency, the $20 bill? He's very much one of the main villains of the story, he even benefited from the support of the Cherokee in the Indian Wars, only to put the seal on their removal later. But I mean, at a time when you're pulling down the statues of Confederates, you're still celebrating an actual instigator of genocide? One of the people responsible for the Trail of Tears?