| OCR Text |
Show MOONBY] TREATY OF NEW ECHOTA- 1835 123 tific manuscripts. The national paper, the Cherokee Phoenix, had been suppressed and its office plant seized by the same guard a few days before. 1 Thus in their greatest need the Cherokee were deprived of the help and counsel of their teachers, their national press, and their chief. Although for two months threats and inducements had been held out to secure a full attendance at the December conference at New Echota, there were present when the proceedings opened, according to the report of Schermerhorn himself, only from three hundred to five hundred men, women, and children, out of a population of over 17,000. Notwithstanding the paucity of attendance and the absence of the principal officers of the Nation, a committee was appointed to arrange the details of a treaty, which was finally drawn up and signed on December 29, 1835.8 Briefly stated, by this treaty of New Echota, Georgia, the Cherokee Nation ceded to the United States its whole remaining territory east of the Mississippi for the sum of five million dollars and a common joint interest in the territory already occupied by the western Cherokee, in what is now Indian Territory, with an additional smaller tract adjoining on the northeast, in what is now Kansas. Improvements were to be paid for, and the Indians were to be removed at the expense of the United States and subsisted at the expense of the Government for one year after their arrival in the new country. The removal was to take place within two years from the ratification of the treaty. On the strong representations of the Cherokee signers, who would probably not have signed otherwise even then, it was agreed that a limited number of Cherokee who should desire to remain behind in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama, and become citizens, having first been adjudged " qualified or calculated to become useful citizens," might so remain, together with a few holding individual reservations under former treaties. This provision was allowed by the commissioners, but was afterward struck out on the announcement by President Jackson of his determination " not to allow any preemptions or reservations, his desire being that the whole Cherokee people should remove together." Provision was made also for the payment of debts due by the Indians out of any moneys coming to them under the treaty; for the reestab-lishment of the missions in the West; for pensions to Cherokee wounded in the service of the government in the war of 1812 and the Creek war; for permission to establish in the new country such military posts and roads for the use of the United States as should be deemed necessary; for satisfying Osage claims in the western territory and , Royce, Cherokee Nation, op. cit. ( Rose arrest), p. 281; Drake, Indians ( Ross, Payne, Phcenix), p. 459,1880; see also Everett speech of May 31, 1838, op. cit. * Royce, op. c i t , pp. 281,282; see also Everett speech, 1838. |
