Cave people. The Cherokee are one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, a term which first occurs in 1876 in reports of the Indian Office; these tribes had their own constitutional governments, modeled on that of the United States, the expenses of which were paid out of their own communal funds. They also farmed after the manner of their white neighbors.
Wealth and fertile land were the Cherokees' undoing. Under the "Indian removal" policy of Andrew Jackson and Van Buren, troops commanded by General Winfield Scott drove the Indians out of their ancestral lands so that the white settlers could occupy them. Herded into the so-called Indian Territory west of the Mississippi, one third of those removed perished on the march, remembered by them as the infamous Trail of Tears.
Most Cherokees now live in Oklahoma, though a small number managed to stay behind. Their population has increased to about 7,000 people, living on about 56,600 acres on the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina.
