Excerpt from "Treaty with the Cherokee"

Published in Law and Treaties, edited by Charles J. Kappler, 1904

The Southern frontier tribes of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole historically held large areas of land in the future states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. The tribes lived in towns, farmed, and had capable leaders. By the early nineteenth century, they would be referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes because of their increasingly settled agricultural way of life.

Prior to the arrival of European colonists in the seventeenth century, it is estimated that some fifty thousand Cherokee lived in two hundred towns. The Cherokee controlled about forty thousand square miles of land, including portions of eight present-day states stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. By the mid-1600s, white traders venturing into the Appalachian Mountains from the colonial coastal settlements made contact with...