Agriculture, Timber, Mining, and Transportation in Cherokee Country Before and After Removal
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2012 Coveted Lands: Agriculture, Timber, Mining, and Transportation in Cherokee Country Before and After Removal Vicki Bell Rozema University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Rozema, Vicki Bell, "Coveted Lands: Agriculture, Timber, Mining, and Transportation in Cherokee Country Before and After Removal. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2012. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1343 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Vicki Bell Rozema entitled "Coveted Lands: Agriculture, Timber, Mining, and Transportation in Cherokee Country Before and After Removal." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Daniel M. Feller, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Steven V. Ash, Lynn A. Sacco, Gerald F. Schroedl Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Coveted Lands: Agriculture, Timber, Mining, and Transportation in Cherokee Country Before and After Removal A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Vicki Bell Rozema May 2012 Copyright © 2011 by Vicki Bell Rozema All rights reserved. ii Abstract Covering a period from approximately 1779 to 1850, this dissertation studies natural resources and land use in Cherokee country before and after forced Cherokee removal from east of the Mississippi. As the market economy in the South grew in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Euro-Americans perceived the Cherokee Nation as an obstacle to commercial transportation and economic expansion. Southern leaders such as John C. Calhoun and Wilson Lumpkin planned to build canals and railroads through the Cherokee Nation. Disputes over saltpeter, gold, salt, and iron mining rights and the ownership of ferries, taverns, and turnpikes caused conflict. The Cherokees resisted all forms of encroachment on their natural resources and continuously modified their laws and methods of dealing with intruders. This dissertation examines the importance of the spread of cotton agriculture across the South, the availability of timber for establishing homesteads and small industry, and the medicinal herbs trade as factors in Cherokee land cessions. It also studies the extent to which a growing national interest in science, a national push for internal improvements, and the policies of the Corps of Engineers influenced Cherokee removal. iii Table of Contents Chapter Page Introduction 1 I. Corn versus Cotton: Agriculture in Cherokee Country Before and After 31 Removal II. Fruits of the Forest: The Timber and Medicinal Herbs Industries 83 III. Saltpeter, Iron, Gold, and other Mineral Riches 110 IV. Rivers, Roads, and Rails: The Influence of Transportation Needs and 181 Internal Improvements V. American Science and the Corps of Engineers in the early Nineteenth 236 Century Conclusion 286 Bibliography 294 Vita 319 iv List of Figures Page Figure 1 Cherokee Nation Boundaries 16 Figure 2 Location of Cherokee Towns in the 18 th Century 17 Figure 3 Physiographic Provinces of the Southeast Including Cherokee Country 34 Figure 4 Southern Cotton Production in 1801 50 Figure 5 The Cotton Belt in 1821 57 Figure 6 The Eight Cherokee Districts, about 1825 60 Figure 7 Cherokee Georgia in 1832 64 Figure 8 Removal Period Cherokee Lands in Southwestern North Carolina 72 Figure 9 Survey Districts and Their Relation to Tennessee Counties 77 Figure 10 The Cotton Belt in 1859 82 Figure 11 Major Rivers in Cherokee Country 184 Figure 12 Fort Southwest Point and the Cumberland Road 194 v Introduction Historians have listed many causes of Cherokee land cessions and the removal of 1838. These include ethnocentrism, discovery of gold in the Georgia mountains, states rights issues, the Georgia Compact of 1802, the perceived threat of sovereign governments within the borders of autonomous states, and depletion of eastern soils due to poor agricultural practices. Andrew Jackson’s investment in the cotton market in Tennessee and his speculation in cotton land in north Alabama have also been cited in connection with western expansion. Similarly, scholars Theda Perdue and Mary Young have mentioned Wilson Lumpkin’s survey of Cherokee lands in 1826 for a railroad route through the mountains as a notable event leading to the Cherokee removal. Such events point to a struggle for control of natural resources like timber, minerals, and transportation routes in the Cherokee country, but these factors have not been thoroughly studied as a cause of Cherokee land cessions. I intend to fill that gap by examining the ways that the expanding commercial economy influenced acquisition of Cherokee lands for mining, agriculture, and other commercial purposes. This work also explores the importance of natural resources such as timber, salt, and iron in developing small subsistence farms and communities in newly acquired Cherokee lands. Finally, this study investigates how the growing national interest in advances in science and engineering in the early nineteenth century influenced southern leaders and the Department of War in their efforts to obtain Cherokee lands. The South embraced new national movements in internal improvements and the application of new technology to mining and transportation. The desire by progress-minded southern whites to 1 develop scientific-based industry and access interstate and international markets is connected to the removal of the Cherokees. 1 This study begins about 1779, when white emigrants were traveling through Cherokee country to reach new settlements on the Cumberland Plateau. This is a period when large numbers of Euro-Americans began to pour over the Appalachian Mountains into Indian lands on the western side. In addition to carving out small subsistence farms on the Cherokee-American frontier, these illegal intruders used local resources to establish transportation routes, build small industry, tap into existing Cherokee trade systems, and establish new ones. The study follows the use of natural resources in Cherokee country to 1850, twelve years after the 1838 removal, to see how white immigrants actually used the natural resources that they coveted. Some resources, like saltpeter, declined in importance, while others, like transportation routes, continued to increase. While this study focuses on the first seventy-five years of the United States, some colonial topics, such as kaolin mining, will also be discussed to show how the Cherokees changed strategies over time to deal with white efforts to control their natural resources. Chapter one analyzes agriculture in the Cherokee Nation before and after removal in 1838. Historians have long argued that the spread of cotton agriculture across the South abetted Cherokee removal. As early as 1920, William E. Dodd’s study of the antebellum South, The Cotton Kingdom , credits cotton with the influx of slave owners into the region. According to Dodd, “The Cherokees, the Creeks, the Choctaws, and the Chickasaws . dwelt upon good 1 James R. Christianson, “Removal: A Foundation for the Formation of Federal Indian Policy,” Journal of Cherokee Studies 10 (Fall 1985): 215-25; Mary Young, “The Exercise of Sovereignty in Cherokee Georgia,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Spring 1990): 43-63; Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston & New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 59-60. 2 cotton lands.” These “lands were rapidly converted into cotton plantations. Pretty cottages and squalid wigwams, fertile fields and wild hunting-grounds, negro slaves, horses, and farming implements all had to be sacrificed without any other reparation than doles of money and such lands as the Indian could settle beyond the Red River.” 2 More recently, Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green have linked the expanding market economy and transportation revolution after the War of 1812 with Indian removal. “Like a flood of water from an upturned bottle, Americans poured into the western country after the war. Grain and livestock farmers spread north of the Ohio River . South of the Ohio the expansion of cotton plantation agriculture produced the same result.” The population of the western territories increased rapidly after the war. The combined populations of Alabama and Mississippi, for example, increased ten-fold from 1810 to 1830. The introduction of steamboats on the Mississippi and other western rivers opened new markets for products from the lands west of the Appalachians and encouraged Americans to grow cotton and other commercial crops. As Perdue and Green explain, “The economic forces that fed this growth generated an unprecedented demand for [indigenous]