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Hello, and welcome to Beautiful Losers of History.  – Episode 1, The End of an Era.

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Alongside slavery, the decimation of America’s indigenous people and nations is usually considered one of the two original sins of the United States. Both travesties began before the idea of a United States even existed, and both accelerated after American Independence. And looking back from the present, it’s easy—and kind of tempting–to see the fate of American Indians as almost inevitably doomed from the moment European settlers arrived. But this is a gross oversimplification. 

In 1513, Ponce de Leon became the first European to arrive on what is now the continental United States–but far from heralding their demise, many Indian Nations thrived for centuries after this introduction, through a network of relationships with each other and with the Europeans.

This did not last forever, though.

To borrow a line from Ernest Hemmingway, for the Indian Nations of the continent, things started to go bad gradually, then suddenly.

At first, European explorers arrived in the Americas and established colonies. These colonies were initially small and acted more like trading posts. But over time, they grew and began attracting permanent European settlers. 

This process occurred over centuries, and it’s important to point out that there was never one overarching policy from Europeans to annex as much Indian land as possible. Instead, individual colonies negotiated individual treaties with individual tribes. 

Sometimes, these treaties were negotiated peacefully in pursuit of trade. Other times, they were negotiated after an armed conflict.

Sometimes, European colonies won these conflicts, and sometimes, Indian Nations won these conflicts.

This all changed when the United States declared independence from Great Britain in 1776. 

Unlike European kingdoms, the United States explicitly had the goal of annexing as much Indian land as possible. As America grew in strength and population, more of its people began to resent the traditional diplomatic approach of negotiating individual treaties with individual tribes. These Americans thought Indians were subjects of the United States, not independent people. They pressured the American government to end the piecemeal approach to land acquisitions and to instead just annex all Indian territory in one fell swoop.

The movement to acquire Indian territory reached its zenith with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This law expelled nearly all indigenous people in the Eastern United States to  lands West of the Mississippi River, in today’s Oklahoma. Signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, it ushered in one of the darkest chapters in American History: The Trail of Tears.

Upwards of one hundred thousand men, women, and children from dozens of tribal nations,  were forced to march hundreds of miles to get to these new lands, and thousands died along the way due to starvation, disease, and exposure to the elements.

Like I said: looking back from the present, it’s tempting to see all of this as inevitable. After all, once Europeans arrived, indigenous people were destined to be destroyed in the face of these new, more powerful strangers, right?

Wrong.

The Indian Removal Act was no forgone conclusion. It only passed by two votes in the House of Representatives. Two votes. Think about that for a moment. If those two votes had been against the Act, history, as we know it, could have been radically different. 

The Indian Removal Act was not universally popular, and Americans were sharply divided by it. The debate over indian Removal raged for a decade before the act’s passage, and resistance to it continued years after it became law. In a speech, one congressman said of the proposed Act: “The evil, sir, is enormous; the violence is extreme; the breach of public faith deplorable; the inevitable suffering incalculable.”

The Indian Removal Act was not passed by an ignorant nation that was naive to its cruelty. It was passed by a sharply divided nation. Opponents saw an evil on the horizon and tried to stop it.  Supporters only saw the potential for their own wealth and prosperity. For these supporters, the Act enshrined into law their belief that the powerful have the right to dominate the powerless.

And that’s just the Americans. Needless to say, Indians weren’t divided on the morality of the Act. They were the ones who organized resistance against it, and they were the ones who forged ties with American allies and brought them to their cause. 

My goal with this podcast is to push back against the argument that this loss was inevitable. Instead, I hope to draw attention to the people and movements that fought against the Indian Removal Act. Looking backward into history tends to make everything seem preordained, but in the moment, when you’re actually living through the unfolding of history, any outcome is possible. 

Before I begin, I want to take a moment to discuss the structure of this podcast. 

Dozens of tribal nations and thousands of individuals fought against the Indian Removal Act, but the Cherokee were the largest nation of them all. Then considered one of the Five so-called “civilized Tribes” tribes, alongside the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole, because they adopted many European American customs and practices, the Cherokee resistance to the Act is also the most well-documented. 

For this reason, our narrative will mostly focus on the history of the Cherokee, the history of the United States, and the driving forces that led to the Act’s creation.

But I’ll also be telling the stories of both the people who fought for and against the act.

These stories take place over decades, so not everybody is going to be introduced all at once. But I’ll begin by introducing 

a man who will play a leading role in the birth, rise, and fall of the Cherokee Nation.

Before we start, I wanna take a moment to note my sources for this episode: Thurman Wilkins  “Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People,” and John Ehle’s “Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation.” I also heavily rely on “History of the Indian Tribes of North America” by Thomas McKenney and James Hall. This book was especially useful to me because it was written in the 1830s, so McKenney and Hall were actually able to interview many of the figures at the center of this story.

But, now that housekeeping is out of the way, let’s get on with the show.

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In 1770, or perhaps 1771, a baby Cherokee was born who history would remember by the name Major Ridge. 

Ridge embodied the tension between modernity and tradition, two traits that were the subject of much debate in the Cherokee Nation between the American Revolution and the Trail of Tears. 

He would fight wars against the United States, and he would fight a war on behalf of the United States. Later, he would enter Cherokee politics and lead the calls for modernization and development. 

He was popular and well-respected by Cherokee and White Men alike. But in the final chapter of his life, after the Indian Removal Act, he would be branded a traitor, and everything he had fought for would crumble. If the Cherokee were the beautiful losers of the great battle against the Indian Removal Act, Ridge would be the biggest loser of them all.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself. Major Ridge didn’t even get the name “Major Ridge” until he was in his 40s. It was Cherokee custom at that time to adopt more than one name over a lifetime, and when he was born, he was given the name Nung-noh-hut-tar-hee, or “He who slays the enemy in the path,” usually translated in English as The Pathkiller. 

As you might be able to tell, I do not speak Cherokee, and this will no doubt be the first of many Cherokee names and words I mispronounce. I apologize. 

Pathkiller was part of the last generation of Cherokee that grew up following the traditional ways of life that existed before European domination of the continent. 

Unfortunately, there is little documentation about his family’s background. What we do know is that his mother was the daughter of a Cherokee woman and a Scottish frontiersman, and his father was a full-blooded Cherokee and a hunter and warrior, like most men in the nation. As his name indicates, it was expected that Pathkiller, which was not an uncommon Cherokee name, would follow a similar warrior path as his father and most men in the nation. 

He was born in a small town on the Hiawassee River on the Western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, in what is today the southeasternmost corner of Tennessee.  But at that time, it was in territory claimed by the Province of North Carolina, a royal colony of the Kingdom of Great Britain. 

The Cherokee originally occupied land West, South, and East of the Southern Appalachian Mountains,  in the modern states of West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. 

But by the time Pathkiller was born, the Cherokee had lost most of their lands East of the Appalachian Mountains to the British colonies in a series of wars.

Despite these victories, Great Britain wanted to avoid future conflicts with Indian tribes.  So in 1763, it declared that the Appalachian mountains would form the western border of its colonies. It was hoped that by separating colonists from Indians, future wars could be avoided.

But this proclamation was widely resented by colonists who hungrily eyed Indian lands on the Western side of the Appalachians.  

So, when the American Revolution began, the Cherokee sided with Britain against the rebelling colonies. 

In 1776, while colonists met in Philadelphia to declare American independence, Cherokee forces attacked rebel colonial outposts that were encroaching on their territory. But the British could provide little military support to their allies because they were fighting the war in faraway Massachusetts and New York. The southern colonies of Virginia, Georgia, and North and South Carolina took advantage of this absence and organized a military campaign against the Cherokee.

They destroyed everything in their path. More than fifty Cherokee towns were burned to the ground. Rebel colonial soldiers cut down Cherokee orchards, burned their farmland, slaughtered horses and livestock, and placed bounties for Indian scalps, with no regard for women or children.

Pathkiller would have been five or six years old and a witness to this devastation firsthand.

One year later, in 1777, a group of chiefs signed the Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner, which ended the immediate conflict and surrendered Cherokee territory in North and South Carolina. But the treaty also laid the foundation for a decades-long war because it placed the heartland of the Cherokee Nation, on the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, in a precarious position. This land now directly bordered American territory. If war broke out again this proximity meant that these Cherokee lands would be the first to face the brunt of it.

The Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner also had the unintended effect of causing a schism within the Cherokee Nation because many chiefs opposed the surrender. One of these chiefs, named Tsi-yu Gan-si-ni or Dragging Canoe in English– led this breakaway faction of Cherokee nearly 100 miles west, away from the border region, to establish new settlements from which they could keep fighting.

The new towns they established were called the “Lower Towns” because they were founded in low-lying lands near rivers. The towns they left behind came to be known as the “Upper Towns” because they were in mountain valleys.

This division would have long-term ramifications within the Cherokee Nation. As I mentioned, the Upper Towns were much closer to American settlements. And despite the constant threat of war hanging over their heads, they adopted American approaches to agriculture and society more readily than the Lower Towns. This proximity also meant that the Upper Towns tried to foster better relations with Americans to prevent future conflicts.

The opposite was true in the “Lower Towns,” where Dragging Canoe and his followers were skeptical of American innovations and more closely adhered to traditional Cherokee practices. In the lower towns, leaders only prepared for war.

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Around the time of the Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner, Pathkiller’s family also evacuated the Upper Towns because of their proximity to the American frontlines.

But where Dragging Canoe turned south and traveled down the Tennessee River, Pathkiller’s family went north, upstream. They eventually arrived at a steep mountain ridge-called Walden Ridge today. This ridge stretches 74 miles from northeast to southwest and is a vertical wall of rock over 3,000 feet high, with small creeks and protected glens across its length. 

It is in one of these sheltered mountain pockets that Pathkiller’s family set up their new home. 

 Meanwhile, American raids continued, primarily in the Upper Towns, where Pathkiller’s family had fled.●  They brought devastation wherever they went until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, which brought to a close the American War of Independence.

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But, all of that must have seemed very far away from the sheltered glen along Walden Ridge, where Pathkiller grew up.  Here, isolated from the hostilities, he lived in peace and learned the traditional skills his people valued to become a hunter and warrior.

Decades later, Thomas McKenney and James Hall would interview Pathkiller and describe his upbringing as follows: 

“His father taught him to steal with noiseless tread upon the grazing animal–to deceive the timid doe by mimicking the cry of the fawn–or to entice the wary buck within the reach of his missile by decorating his own head with antlers. He was inured to patience, fatigue, self-denial, and exposure, and acquired the sagacity which enabled him to chase with success the wild cat, the bear, and the panther.”

Pathkiller learned to build canoes, and bows and arrows. He learned how to fast in the morning and travel all day without food or water while hunting. He learned to pray and ask permission from every animal before killing it. He learned to sacrifice the tongue of every deer he killed by giving it to the fire and he learned to pass his moccasins over the flames to protect him from snakes.  

It was during his teenage years, along Walden Ridge, that Pathkiller earned the name he is known to in history. When traveling to Cherokee towns and camps, he was asked where he had come from, and his reply was, “I came along the top of the mountain.”

As a result, the young hunter received the name “Kah-nug-da-tla-geh”, which in English means “The man who walks on the mountaintop.” Hence, to English speakers, he would be known as The Ridge. And it will be the name I use for him for the rest of the podcast until he earns the field officer rank of “Major” in the War of 1812.

Around this time, the Ridge entered the next stage of his life: That of a Cherokee warrior. His parents found a respected chief to conduct the ritual that initiated this rite of passage.

“Gatlun hi a-sga si-ti” the Chief said to the Ridge. “I shall make you dreadful.”

The chief scratched the naked boy with the sharpened bone of a wolf. He cut a continuous line through the Ridge’s skin, from the palm of one hand up his arm and across his chest, and down the other arm and hand– then he continued, cutting the line of flesh back up his arm and over his shoulder and back, then down his leg and foot, until it again turned back up and went down his other leg. When the chief was finished, there was a continuous line of blood stretching across his limbs and over his entire body.

He then plunged into a cold stream after which the chief washed his whole body with medicinal herbs.

With the ceremony complete, The Ridge entered into adulthood and became the warrior he had spent his life preparing for. The chief’s vow to make him dreadful, or a-sga si-ti, would prove to be an accurate one.

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As The Ridge entered adulthood, relatons between Americans and Cherokee remained tense. Deep in the wilderness and far from the frontier, in the “Lower Towns,” Chief Dragging Canoe led raids against American outposts in Cherokee territory. But for the “Upper Towns,” the end of the Americn War of Independence brought a welcome, if uneasy, peace during which the Cherokee could recover and rebuild.

During this relative peace, The Ridge, now about 15, and his family left their isolation along Walden Ridge, and rejoined the rest of the Nation. They settled in the Upper Town of Tsi-stu-yi, or Rabbit Place, in English, near the home they abandoned at the start of the war. 

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It was during this tense peace, in 1785, that the Cherokee signed their first official treaty with the new United States government. The Treaty of Hopewell established a border around Cherokee territory for the first time, and it required the Cherokee to surrender more land in central Tennessee around the new settlement of Nashville. The treaty also established that the Cherokee were under the, er, “protection” of the United States, meaning they could not swear allegiance to any foreign power. 

In exchange for these concessions, the United States recognized Cherokee sovereignty over their remaining lands and banned Americans from settling in their territory. Any Americans living in Cherokee lands forfeited the protection of the United States, and the Cherokee were granted the right to punish these squatters as they saw fit.

Now, I want to pause and explore this provision for a second. The ban on Americans settling on Cherokee lands is an important milestone in US-Cherokee relations. Despite being halfheartedly enforced at the best of times, it would be the cornerstone of US-Indian policy until the 20th century. 

You may be rolling your eyes at this supposed recognition of Cherokee sovereignty, because we know that settlers would keep coming and that the United States would keep annexing these lands over time. But every early American president sincerely supported the ban on settlers in Indian territories. To be sure, this wasn’t entirely altruistic; the long-term American goal was always to annex more Indian land, but the federal government wanted to obtain lands gradually, through peaceful negotiations, over time.

From the American perspective, Indian Nations had an excessiveexessive amountammount of land for their small populations, and to Americans, the most efficient use of land was for farming.

American Indians already practiced agriculture but most of their territorial lands were wilderness used for hunting. If the American government had its way, these Indians would stop hunting altogether and sell this now unused hunting land to the United States. 

Under this vision, Indians would keep farming in their remaining territories under their own sovereignty. But eventually, it was hoped, they would assimilate into American society and be granted full citizenship. 

That was the thought process behind it anyway. As you might have noticed, it didn’t leave a lot of room for Indian consent to the plan.

Frontier settlers violating the ban on entering Indian territories threw a hand grenade into this plan.  

By law, Indian Nations were allowed to punish and remove these trespassers as they saw fit. This often meant the destruction of the trespasser’s illegal farms and the expulsion–if not execution–of the settlers.

This enforcement, though legal, always led to a backlash among the American public, who would agitate for war against the offending Indians. These wars were violent and very expensive compared to the government’s idealized piecemeal strategy of obtaining land.

But the federal government had no way to enforce the law that quarantined Indian territory from settlers. If an American wanted to go into the wilderness, no government official could realistically stop them. The Frontier stretched nearly a thousand miles and was impossible to patrol at that time. There was no railroad, telegraph, or telephone system at this time. Once you were out of sight of the government, you were essentially on your own.

Like I said, it’s easy to be cynical about the prohibition on American settlers, but that’s because we know how all of this turns out. At the time, no Cherokee ever signed a treaty saying they surrendered sovereignty and granted the United States supreme control. No American official did either. If they had, there would not be any fight over Cherokee sovereignty in the first place.

So while it may be easy to scoff at these treaty provisions today, at the time, they were seen as incredibly important by everyone, Cherokee and American alike.

***

The failure of the American government to enforce the Treaty of Hopewell’s ban on White settlers in Cherokee territory meant that the relative peace in the Upper Towns could not last forever.

The Lower Towns under Chief Dragging Canoe had been at continuous war with the United States during this time, and its impressive that the Upper Towns managed to avoid this conflict as long as they had. This peace was largly thanks to the efforts of the principal chief of the Upper Towns, a man named Utsi’dsata, or Old Tassell in English, who worked with American territorial leaders to prevent Cherokee conflicts with illegal settlers from breaking out into war. 

But this peace was shattered in June 1788, when Old Tassell, was invited to an American fort after a family of illegal settlers had been killed by a group of Cherokee. Old Tassell wanted to negotiate so that this violent outburst wouldn’t lead to war. But when he approached the American fort under a white flag of truce, he was shot dead in a surprise attackattact. The entire Cherokee nation—across both the “Upper” and the “Lower Towns”— was outraged.

In the “Lower Towns,” a new generation of anti-American chiefs had risen under the leadership of Chief Dragging Canoe. One of these chiefs, named Talitsus’ga, or Doublehead, in English, was Old Tassell’s brother and he was out for blood.

Rabbit Place, the town where The Ridge’s family lived, was engulfed in war fever like the rest of the Cherokee Nation. Against the wishes of his parents, the now 17-year-old Ridge volunteered to join the fight. His mother and father were ill, and no doubt he carried a lot of responsibilities in his family but he had spent his life training to be a warrior, and he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity.

He joined a warband that left Rabbit Place and, following tradition, on their first day out, they fasted. Every day thereafter, they were allotted just one cup of cornmeal for rations. It wasn’t going to be an easy war.

Along the way, The Ridge and his fellow warriors joined up with other Cherokees until the war band numbered close to 200 men. Their goal was to destroy a small fortified American settlement called Houston’s Station. It was an isolated outpost 16 miles south of White’s Fort, later called Knoxville, the largest American settlement in southern Appalachia. 

Before they could reach their destination though, they ran into some American reconnaissance scouts in the burnt-out Cherokee village of Citico. The scouts had been sent from White’s Fort to find the war band so that a much larger force could be sent to crush them. But things didn’t go according to plan.

Citico had once been the largest of the Upper Towns, but it was abandoned during the American Revolution. It’s old apple orchards, however, remained. The hungry American soldiers set aside their guns to pick these apples, and the Cherokee took advantage of this opening to attack. The Americans were taken completely by surprise. Some ran away into the woods when the fighting started. Others tried escaping into a nearby river.

One American grappled with a Cherokee soldier and was preparing to kill him, but before he could The Ridge, armed with a spear, charged towards the American and plunged his weapon into his body. It was his first time killing a man. But it wouldn’t be his last.

The Cherokee pursued the fleeing Americans to within a few miles of White’s Fort, killing several more along the way. The next day they laid siege to Houston’s Station but abandoned their effort after a large American rescue force approached. They returned home, satisfied with their victory at Citico.

Soon though, word came that an American militia was gathering to attack the nearby “Upper Towns”. The Ridge took stock of the situation and relocated his family again, including his sick parents, to an isolated community called Pine Log, in the “Lower Towns” near the southern edge of Cherokee territory in what is today northern Georgia. 

After securing his family’s safety, The Ridge joined a massive Cherokee force of 3,000 warriors led by Chief Doublehead, the brother of the murdered chief Old Tassel. 

In October 1788, the Cherokee made plans to attack White’s Fort and Houston’s Station once again, but before they could, winter set in and it was decided to postpone the attack.

They established winter quarters in the nearby mountains so that they could make a final push against the settlements when spring arrived. But they never got the chance.

In January 1789, the American General John Siever learned of the Cherokee winter camp from his scouts and sent a force to destroy them. The Cherokee were taken by surprise, and Siever’s men quickly surrounded them with a line of guns. But the Cherokee had spent years clandestinely purchasing guns from British and Spanish merchants and they fought back ferociously. Soon, the battle devolved into a violent melee of hand-to-hand combat in between volleys of gunfire.

The Cherokee suffered a terrible loss. In a letter to his superiors, Siever claimed to have killed 145 of them. The rest scattered into the woods, and The Ridge was among them. It’s unknown whether he survived thes depths of winter in the mountains alone or with a group of surivors from the battle, but the record shows he returned to Pine Log in March after seven months on the warpath.

He arrived home to the grim news that both of his parents had died in his absence. Their deaths left him responsible for reaising his younger sibbling. It’s easy to forget how young The Ridge was, but at the time, he was probably only 17 years old. Only a youth himself, he was now the head of his family.

McKenney and Hall write that: “Under these depressing circumstances, he spent several years in obscurity, but always actively engaged either upon the warpath or in hunting expeditions to remote places where the game abounded.”

The United States and the Cherokee were nominally at peace during this time, but low-grade conflict continued, so in 1791, a new treaty, the Treaty of Holston, attempted to stabilize relations. 

The Treaty of Holston contained many of the same provisions as the Treaty of Hopewell. Once again, it affirmed that Americans were prohibited from settling within Cherokee lands and once again, it declared that the Cherokee could punish any Americans who did. 

This time, though, the United States agreed to give certain Cherokee chiefs annual cash payments. These payments were ostensibly for the entire Cherokee Nation, but the Americans were fine looking the other way if the chiefs pocketed them instead. In exchange, the chiefs surrendered more territory to the United States, this time in what is today Northeastern Tennessee.

The Treaty of Holston did little to ease tensions, and many Cherokees felt that they had been tricked. They had surrendered more land, just to get the same guarantees they had gotten in 1785 under the Treaty of Hopewell.

Violence between Cherokees and illegal settlers continued, including an incident involving The Ridge. In May 1793, he and some associates killed a white man and his son, and stole 20 of their horses. In a scheme that was probably too clever by half, they left a pair of war clubs belonging to another tribe near the bodies to suggest the killings had not been done by the Cherokees. 

The ruse failed, and the governor of the Southwest Territory, the future state of Tennessee, ordered a militia to search for the killers. The militia was prohibited from crossing the border into Cherokee territory, but they ignored it. The militia arrived at Pine Log and murdered eleven men before leaving.

The Ridge was absent when all of this happened. But when he returned, he received a cold welcome. The people of Pine Log were furious at him and his comrades for stoking the violence by killing the two Americans and stealing their horses.

McKenney and Hall write that: “The relatives of the slain were incensed, and disposed to take revenge for their loss upon the young men who had occasioned the misfortune, nor were there wanting accusers to upbraid them openly as the authors of a great public calamity.”

The Ridge was shaken by his people’s reaction. He attempted to regain their favor by raising a war whoop and calling on volunteers to march with him and seek revenge. But he was greeted with silence. Nobody wanted to join him. 

Despite this initial reaction, Cherokee sentiment soon changed. The militia leader who violated his orders and entered Cherokee territory to attack Pine Log was put on trial and quickly found not guilty of the eleven murders. Once again, the Cherokee were incensed into action.

Just as before, a band of Cherokees gathered for war—1,000 of them this time—and began the long march to White’s Fort, where they planned to destroy the American settlement once and for all. 

The Cherokee were led by a Chief named Kunokeski (Or John Watts, in English) who proposed killing every man in White’s Fort. Chief Doublehead, the brother of the murdered Chief Old Tassel, was second in command and he insisted they kill every white person, women and children included.

These, and other debates, slowed the march until it reached a small garrison called Cavett’s Station. 

Just one American family, the Cavetts, lived there. There were 13 members of them, and only three were men. Nevertheless, Doublehead ordered a siege. The Cavetts resisted but were outnumbered and after a few hours, they surrendered under lenient terms.

 Chief John Watts negotiated the surrender by telling the Cavetts that they would not be harmed. They were to be taken prisoner and exchanged for an equal number of Cherokee prisoners held by American authorities. Doublehead seethed in rage at the offer.

He still sought revenge for his brother’s murder, and as soon as the Cavetts opened the gate to surrender, Doublehead let out a war whoop and raised his tomahawk. His men followed him and proceeded to massacre the entire family in a melle of violence. The Ridge, no stranger to war himself, was said to have turned away in disgust and shame, unable to stop the melee.

Chief John Watts looked on in horror and the event came to be known as the Cavett’s Station Massacre. 

Word of the massacre spread quickly, and American General John Siever raised a militia for a revenge expedition. To make matters worse, the massacre caused a rupture among Cherokee leaders because of its brutality, and many called off the campaign and went home.

What started as a warband of a thousand men dwindled down to a few hundred. General Siever had a well-armed force of 800 Americans. At the Cherokee village of Itawayi, called High Town in English, they clashed, but it wasn’t even close.

After destroying the Cherokee forces, Siever turned his wrath on High Town itself, and like so many other Cherokee towns, it was destroyed.

“I have great reason to believe [The Cherokee] ardor and spirit were well checked” Siever wrote to his superiors after the battle. He was right.

The Battle of High Town was the last battle ever fought between the Americans and the Cherokee.

In 1794, Chiefs from the “Upper” and “Lower” towns met with the Governor of the Southwest Territory at Tellico Blockhouse, a new American fort that was intended to keep the peace between Cherokees and settlers. Both parties signed a peace treaty that restored the status quo that existed before the war and notably didn’t demand more territory from the Cherokee. After decades of conflict, both sides were exhausted and eager to end the bloodshed.

In Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, George Washington met with a Cherokee delegation and offered them a silver peace pipe as a memento of his warm and abiding friendship.

Meanwhile, The Ridge returned to Pine Log. The massacre at Cavett’s Station ended his support for Chief Doublehead, and the grueling, fruitless years at war shattered his belief in the warrior ethos that had once consumed him. From here on out, and for the rest of his life, he would pursue alternative methods to protect the Cherokee from American domination.

***

Alright, are you still with me? I know this sounds like a lot: skirmish after skirmish, war after war, revenge after revenge. Going forward, conflict between the Cherokee and Americans would be fought in the halls of Congress and the court of public opinion.

If you wonder why the Cherokee didn’t resist the Trail of Tears with force, these years are the reason why. It had become an unavoidable, bitter truth: The Americans were too strong, and they could not be defeated on the battlefield.

Going forward, the Cherokee would embrace modernization and internal developments in politics, industry, agriculture, and education. War could not protect the Cherokee from the United States, but perhaps, it was hoped, these developments would. 

Next Episode, we’ll examine these developments that led to rapid changes within the Cherokee Nation, and we’ll see The Ridge enter Cherokee politics for the first time. Chief Doublehead will grow in power and become increasingly erratic until The Ridge and his allies are forced to stand up to him in a final showdown once and for all.

***CREDITS***

Until then, if you enjoyed this episode, I would really appreciate it if you liked and subscribed to Beautiful Losers on your podcast app, as well as leaving a review. You can go to BeautifulLosersofHistory.com to learn more about the show, and see pictures and maps of the people and places in this episode. If you have any questions or notice any mistakes on my part, feel free to reach out to me at BeautifulLosersofHistory@gmail.com. Hit me up on BlueSky too, where you can find me under the handle nathanmcdermott.bsky.social.

Beautiful Losers of History is written and narrated by me, Nathan McDermott. Logo design is by Nicole Stallings-Blanche, and the theme music and transition sounds are from the Four Seasons, by Vivaldi, under a Creative Commons license. Background Audio is courtesy of Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com. Thanks again, and until next time, this has been Beautiful Losers of History.