The Trail Of Tears

8 Pages 2052 Words

asis of gender. The women farmed and men hunted, although the men helped clear fields and plant the crops and the women helped dress and tan deerskins. Young Cherokee men and women confirmed their marriages by an exchange of corn and deer meat (Perdue & Green, 2). Missionaries believed that, on average, the number of Cherokees who could rea!
d was higher than that of their white neighbors (Gilbert, 8). The arrival of Europeans became the greatest challenge for the Cherokee people. Before they ever saw their first white man, they felt the effects of the enemy that accompanied the settlers. The Native Americans contained little immunity to fight the deadly European diseases. They had no knowledge of how to treat them. The diseases took their toll on the Indians, reducing their populations from more than thirty thousand Cherokees before the introduction of diseases to as few as sixteen thousand after (5). The Indians developed a deadly logic to the situation; all epidemic illness followed the white man into the country, therefore the white man is the cause of the epidemics (Starkey, 10). The first known contact with the Cherokees was from the Spaniards. The primary motives for early English exploration were trade and military alliances; it was not until later that land obtainment became an obsession (Fogelson, 11).
Between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, British hunters and settlers started to push westward into what the Cherokees saw as their land. The Cherokees eagerly welcomed the British Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. The proclamation turned out to be no more than a paper blockade that the settlers ignored. The Cherokees soon be...