Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
By: Dr. Bill Ambrose
English Interests Prevail
That trade paradigm between the Indians and the French, which unlike the English, did not include the wholesale taking of land for farming, had been considered mutually beneficial, facilitating general peace across the region for the previous five decades before 1763. Over the next three decades, frequent irritation created by an incipient, but persistent, British presence in the Great Lakes region spreading down the Mississippi River Valley and settlement pressures from Americans created increasing conflict and ensuring that English interests prevailed.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_history_of_the_United_States
Spanish Interests
Spain’s interest was limited to the maintenance of a buffer zone between the British and Spain’s own perceived rich mineral wealth in the Southwest desert, and in achieving that at a minimal cost. England’s efforts were focused on limiting the American colonies to the Atlantic coast which controlled the flow of raw products toward British manufacturers and limited England’s expenses, knowing that Indian Country was too large to govern from across an ocean.
Restricting Immigration
Keeping American settlement out of Indian Territory kept alive a persistent hope by the English that they could resurrect a new British colony through the middle of North America centered on the Mississippi River.
Source: https://picryl.com/media/cherokee-nation-emissaries-of-peace-1762-94f6b6
Saint Louis
St. Louis was established in 1763 by Pierre Laclede and Auguste Choteau, having travelled upstream on the Mississippi River from their homes in New Orleans. St. Louis, strategically located on the west bank of the Mississippi River at the mouth of the Missouri River, further opened trading opportunities for the French in the valley, many having been there in significant numbers since the 1720’s settlement of Ste. Genevieve.
St. Louis quickly became the epicenter of the trans-Mississippi fur trade. Expensive, highly-sought-after peltries were shipped north in the winter to preserve their value. Lesser valued furs were shipped south to markets in New Orleans. Fairly quickly the Colony of Virginia began to think about its western border as the Mississippi River at St. Louis.
Source: https://digital.shsmo.org/digital/collection/Maps/id/78/
The Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris, Feb. 10, 1763, ended the French and Indian War. Interestingly, Fort Duquesne had fallen into English hands November 25, 1758, with the aid of the Cherokees. Quebec fell to the English on September 18, 1759; that ended any French dominion in America save a narrow strip in southern Mississippi.
Solicited by their British friends, the Cherokee had been muscled into the northern war, distant from their homeland. Circumstances arose on the Cherokees return home that created adversarial conflicts on the western fronts of several of the British colonies; likely, the French-allied northern Native Americans’ tortures committed during the war had sensitized the battle-worn colonial militias to Indian outrages. Regardless, neither the Cherokees nor the frontier colonial settlers were willing to let insult pass unanswered.
War with the Cherokee
So began three years of war between the Cherokee Tribe and the colonial settlers. The Cherokee homeland in many locations was destroyed, towns burned down, crops and livestock carried off or killed. At the end of the chaos, the Cherokee Tribe was a mere shadow of its former strength and number; smallpox had added to the misery and death. During the eight years of the war, from 1755 to 1763, at least four new treaties were signed between the Cherokees and the British colonies. The lands taken from the tribe included extensive areas of its traditional hunting ground north and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains and east of the Savannah River.
The taking of Cherokee land continued. King George III issued his most-famous 1763 Proclamation drawing a line tracing the ridges of the Appalachian chain, the lands upon which its waters flowed to the Atlantic were for colonial settlement. The lands laying west of the Proclamation Line were reserved for the Indians, a concession to the Native tribes for their assistance with the British during the war. The colony of Georgia was bisected by the line from north to south. And the seeds of future conflict were planted.
The Treaty of Hard Labor
In response to the western limits defined in the Proclamation of 1763, because American settlers were already residing on lands west of the Allegheny Mountains and had invested in land claims to the Ohio River, the British negotiated the Treaty of Hard Labor with the Cherokee. That treaty, signed in 1768, relinquished Cherokee claims to nearly all of the lands of what became West Virginia.
No exact calculation has been made to quantify the amount of land taken, but it was a substantial portion of the Cherokee homeland. Of course, it became available to American land speculation and settlement, albeit the settlers were British citizens at that time. The calculus was simple, take land from the Cherokees and open it to American settlers.
Note: See the individual Royce Map Area pages (like the one one below) where we calculated size of the areas lost using much more precise geospatial information systems (GIS) methods than those which were available when the treaties were executed.
Area 3
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS) Missing Areas 1, 2, & 3.
Area 3 on the Royce Map is supposed to represent the lands ceded by the Treaty of Hard Labor. Current research illuminates a much more extensive transfer of land with this treaty. Specifically, the Cherokee Nation relinquished any claim to the lands east of the Appalachian Mountains and Great Britain gave up claim to the lands west of the Appalachians. This modern map shows the demarcation line established by the Treaty of Hard Labor.
It is a line starting at the mouth of the Kanawha River into the Ohio River tracing a straight line southward to Tryon Mountain, called by the Cherokee “Great Mountain.” The line continues southwesterly to the northern border of Spanish Florida. The actual wording of the treaty that describes the line is shown in Article 1 of the treaty here. Read the Treaty of Hard Labor.
At the signing of the Treaty of Hard Labor, Cherokee Chief Oconostota declared, “We have now given the white men enough land to live on.” In response the British promised to enforce the new borderline and prevent future settlement of colonists west of the line.
The Treaty of Lochaber
The 1770 Treaty of Lochaber followed only two years later as the rush of settlers continued unabated by the Treaty of Hard Labor. Area 4 on Royce’s map defines the region of the treaty.
Area 4
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS) Missing Areas 1, 2, 3 & 4.
Of particular interests is the southwestern extent of the area. As described in the treaty explanation, the Cherokee chief, Little Carpenter, “pitied” the Watauga settlers already living there and allowed the southern boundary to be extended south to the Watauga River so that the “illegal” settlers would not have to removed.
Area 5
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS) Missing Areas 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5.
Cherokee lands ceded from Area 5 represents the results of an “arrangement” made pursuant to the Treaty of Lochaber. Reading the second half of that treaty’s description, the reader will notice that the Cherokee had apparently agreed to run the eastern boundary line from the Long Island of the Holston River to the “headwaters of the Kentucky River.”
The Treaty with Virginia
From there, instead of the line continuing do north, the line traced westward, following the Kentucky River to its mouth into the Ohio River, then along the Ohio to its union with the Kanawha at Point Pleasant. This was never a bono fide treaty, but many square miles of land were lost to the Cherokee anyway. This treaty was never given a name other than the “Treaty with Virginia in early 1772.”
The Treaty of Augusta
The Treaty of Augusta, signed in 1773, ceded two million acres of Cherokee and Creek lands to Georgia to resolve hopeless indebtedness by the two tribes to white traders. The European finished goods – guns, ammunition, cloth, beads, blankets, etc. – had become necessities to the members of the tribe. As the deer became scarce from over hunting to trade for ever more of the finished European goods, the Cherokees created debt which was forced to be settled by giving up Cherokee land.
Area 6
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS) Missing Areas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6.
The Treaty of Sycamore Shoals
The 1775 “Treaty of Sycamore Shoals” ultimately resulted in the loss of most of Kentucky, the rich Cherokee hunting ground, to white takeover by the “long knives.” This treaty caused the withdrawal of important young chief Dragging Canoe and his warriors to Chickamauga Creek, and his prediction that Kentucky would be a “Dark and bloody land.” Indeed, it was until 1794, as thousands of American settlers were killed by Shawnee and Cherokee warriors.
Area 7
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS) Missing Areas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7.
Area 7 is huge and it depicts the Cherokee land lost in this “treaty.” However, by the Agreement of 1730, the Cherokee could not sell their land to anyone except the English. Secondarily, the “sale” was to Richard Henderson and the Transylvania Company for 12,000 English Pounds, most of which were trading goods. The colony of Virginia quickly declared the sale illegal and null and void. But it opened the gate to most of Kentucky and significant portion of Tennessee to settlers and land speculators.
The Revolutionary War Begins
Superimposed on these actions, the Revolutionary War began in the East between the colonists and England. English support of the Cherokees effectively made the war have a second front to the West.
The continued encroachment of white settlers onto Cherokee lands had caused the Cherokee to align with the British at the start of the American Revolution. Pre-emptory attacks by the Cherokee on American frontier settlements failed, but retaliatory attacks by Southern states’ militias and regulars destroyed untold Cherokee villages and humiliated the Tribe.
The Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner
The Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner transferred the bulk of Cherokee land in South Carolina to that state on May 20, 1777. Area 8 represents the Cherokee land lost in that treaty.
Area 8
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS) Missing Areas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8.
The Treaty at the Great Island of Holston
On July 20, 1777, Virginians negotiated a treaty at the Great Island of the Holston, resulting in the loss to the Cherokee of Area 9 on the Royce Map. Both the Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner and this Great Island treaty were enabled by a conservative leadership within the Cherokee Nation in recompense for aggressive attacks against frontier settlers by Dragging Canoe’s band of Chickamaugans.
The destruction of a large portion of the Cherokee resources and villages by colonists-frontier settlers in response brought the Cherokees to their knees, prompting these two treaties. A total of over five million acres were added to North and South Carolina and Tennessee from these treaties.
Area 9
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS)
Source: MoTrailofTears.com Geographic Information System (GIS) Missing Areas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9.
Next: Chapter 3: A New Nation Fights a Two Front War (45.03)
- Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: Europeans Arrive In the New World (45.01)
- Chapter 2: English Interests Prevail (45.02)
- Chapter 3: A New Nation Fights a Two Front War (45.03)
- Chapter 4: Treaties with a New Nation (45.04)
- Chapter 5: A Bold Expansion Plan (45.05)
- Chapter 6: A Barrier To Manifest Destiny (45.06)
- Chapter 7: Are the Cherokee a Sovereign Nation? (45.07)
- Chapter 8: The War of 1812 (45.08)
- Chapter 9: United We Stand – Divided We Fall (45.09)
- Chapter 10: Consent to Cession? (45.10)
- Chapter 11: The Cherokee Unite (45.11)
- Chapter 12: Keep Moving Westward? (45.12)
- Chapter 13: “[T]he most solemn guarantee of the United States” (45.13)
- Chapter 14: Arrival in “Indian Country” (45.14)
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