TAHLEQUAH, Okla. – A tale of gold and greed pushing out Natives from their lands in Georgia was detailed by a Cherokee Nation project manager at this month’s Lunch & Learn, staged by the tribe.
Last year, LeeAnn Dreadfulwater gave a talk on the wildlife management area in the area formerly known as Camp Gruber. Before she started her March 25 talk on the gold rush, she sat at a table eating an Indian taco, along with David Cornsilk.
“I like to find the nuggets of history that people don’t get in the bigger, broader history,” Dreadfulwater said. “I honestly think a lot of people don’t realize this part of the story of how Cherokees got to Indian Territory. What was one of the biggest things that propelled us out of the state was finding gold in Georgia.”
Two gold rushes predated the famous gold rush in California in 1849; the first one was in North Carolina in 1799, and the other was in Northern Georgia about October 1828. By 1829, merchants were coming in and wanted to be paid for the supplies, and the federal government decided to put in a mint in Dahlonega, Georgia.
“People came in and started doing placer mining, related to panning of gold, which you see with the stereotypical miner with their little pans,” Dreadfulwater said. “They were looking to see what gold they could just pick up, and using the pans, and when that ran out, they began doing hydraulics and pit mining.”
Already upset at the Cherokees because of the strides they were making with a written language, ratifying their own constitution, and having their own laws and enforcement and a newspaper, whites could not tolerate the Natives getting the gold.
The Cherokees didn’t value gold like the Incas, Mayans and Spaniards, Cornsilk said.
“We had been mining copper for centuries, and gold was something they probably weren’t paying attention to – being so soft, it wasn’t as usable,” Dreadfulwater said. “When Georgians got upset at this, they began passing a lot of punitive laws.”
She said gold was one of the many factors that caused the federal government to move the Cherokees west on the Trail of Tears.
“They passed laws that said Cherokees couldn’t mine gold on their own property,” Dreadfulwater said. “And Cherokees could not testify in court; they were deemed incompetent to testify.”
Cornsilk said on the maps created laying out the lottery properties, the gold fields were separate. Dreadfulwater said the allotment in the gold fields were only 40 acres instead of 60.
“The lottery was open only to white citizens of Georgia for any of the lots,” Cornsilk said.
The lottery began in 1805, with getting rid of the Creek’s land, and the gold was an incentive to move all the Natives out.
“They started the lottery before the Cherokees even had a chance to move out of their homes; they were literally drawing for lotteries that Cherokees were living in,” Dreadfulwater said.
Cornsilk said Chief John Ross was in Washington, D.C., and his property was allotted with his wife and children still living in the house.
“They had to move across the line into Tennessee to an old cabin, which is still there – the Ross House – and she was sickly,” Dreadfulwater said. “They came in and told them to leave and they weren’t able to take any of their things with them.”
Some of the wealthiest and most educated Natives lost their homes, because whites were “chomping at the bit” to get their hands on the nice properties.
“They were beautiful mansions and plantations,” Dreadfulwater said.
One of the aftermaths of the Removal was Georgia’s passing a law repealing all the punitive laws that were in place against the Cherokees who remained in Georgia.
“They had to be sufficiently civilized, had to be living like a white person, and basically had to look like a white person,” Cornsilk said. “George Waters was a state legislator, and he was Cherokee, and it happened because these laws were repealed against Creeks and Cherokees and declared them as white people.”
She said these folks rescinded their citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. Cornsilk said while people were being forced out of their homes and into concentration camps, these people wanted to stay, be “white,” and say goodbye to their fellow Cherokees.
“All the folks mining and tearing up the land were struggling to find gold, and in 1849, they began hearing about the bigger gold rush in California and left after destroying the land,” Dreadfulwater said.
Barb Daily sat at a table with Janet Bahr and Buck Morgan. She attends all of the luncheon lectures put on by the Cherokee Nation.
“The gold discovery in the Southeast was the nail in the coffin for the Removal, and LeeAnn Dreadfulwater is such a great speaker and so knowledgable; I’m here to listen,” Daily said.
Bahr said she was not aware of the gold rushes that affected the Cherokees in Georgia and was there to learn. Morgan said his interest was piqued because he used to live in Georgia and was interested in the influence whites had on Eastern Oklahoma with the gold rush.
What’s next
The next Lunch & Learn is “Land Language and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History,” by Dr. Julie Reed, on April 15, at noon, in the NSU Jazz Lab.