John Lawrence Reynolds

“Removal Act of 1830. The residents found the Native Americans at Qualla quaint and amusing, and some would purchase Cherokee handicrafts to take home. The Removal Act of 1830, as vile a piece of legislation as ever enacted by a democratic government, decreed that all native peoples residing east of the Mississippi were to be relocated in Oklahoma. Ten thousand years of Native American culture meant nothing; a stroke of President Andrew Jackson’s pen set more than 100,000 Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw natives on a forced march west, a trek that has become known as the Trail of Tears. Many died on the way; others chose to die in protest against becoming strangers in a land bequeathed to them by their ancestors. But a handful of Cherokee successfully avoided the government round-up. They hid in the hills of south-east Tennessee, hills through which no white settler dare pass, and when a more enlightened federal government established the Qualla Reservation in 1889, their descendants were rewarded with the return of lands which had been their birthright from the beginning.”
― John Lawrence Reynolds, MAD NOTIONS