Cherokee Trail newspaper articles

aunt minerva collection

Death and Tourism: Enshrining Cherokee Tears
by Ronald SmothersSpecial to The New York Times
HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. Dec. 19-No Cherokee Indians live here now, nor did they ever, but their history marks this town forever.
Poking through the bluegrass are the gravestones of two Cherokee chiefs, silent reminders that 4,000 Indians died here and elsewhere along the infamous "Trail of Tears", the tribe's forced march to Oklahoma 150 years ago from its home in the mountains of Georgia and North Carolina.
On Wednesday, President Ronald Reagan cleared the way for a more formal memorial when he signed a bill establishing the Trail of Tears as a National Historic Trail and designating Hopkinsville as one of the three places where the National Park Service may erect exhibits commemorating the event.
Tourist Mecca Envisioned
One of the other places specified in the law is Fort Smith, Ark., on that state's border with Oklahoma, which marks a stop on the water route that an estimated 6,000 Cherokees took in the removal. Tahlequah, Okla., the trail's end and now the capital of the Western Branch of the Cherokee Nation, is the third site designated in the bill.
The signing of the bill comes just before the 150th anniversary of the deportation of 14,000 more Cherokees by United States troops in 1838.
While Hopkinsville is no center of Indian culture, it is one of the few places along the trail where there are gravestones for the Cherokees who died on the march. And many in this city of 28,000 are looking to the markers-two jagged, moss-covered slivers of fieldstone-as cornerstones of a tourist trade that they hope will revive the area's sagging agricultural economy.
Beverly Baker, president of the city's Trail of Tears Commission, which organized letter writing efforts to press for the bill's passage, said that the plans include a museum, annual meetins of Cherokee tribal groups, outdoor exhibits and a replica of a Cherokee village the way it would have looked before the tribe's removal from ancestral lands.
The Cherokees Approve
Local officials make no apologies for their plans to build a money-making enterprise on memories of injustice and death.
"What it commemorates is not a happy time in history," said Elliot R. Miles, chairman of the city's tourism commission. "But neither was Pearl Harbor and I don't think Hawaii turns down tourist dollars."
As for the Cherokees themselves, they welcome Hopkinsville's enthusiasm and even its entrepreneurial spirit. Bob Blankenship, president of the tribal council of the Eastern Branch of the Cherokee Nation, which is based on a 57,000 acre reservation in North Carolina, said he hoped that greater awareness of Cherokee history that the designation could spawn would spill over to the tribe's already considerable tourist-based industries in Cherokee, N.C.
"We're a tourist area too and this could help us as well," he said, noting that the tribal council operates a Cherokee village, souvenir factories, bingo games, and a historical light and sound show.
'It Helps Us Remember'
William Powers, a history professor at Rutgers University and a specialist in American Indian history, said it was not suprising that Cherokees would react approvingly to the commercialization of their history by non-Indians. Unlike western and northwestern tribes, Mr. Powers said, the Cherokees have generally been better off economically and have themselves capitalized on tourism.
Mrs. Baker said the locka commission had reached out to Indian groups and received their support for the city's plans. Ray Emaneul, a full-blooded Cherokee who is vice president of the Nashville-based Native American Indian Movement, said that the group supported Hopkinsville.
"I'm sure some Indians are looking at the economic benefits of it," he said. "But for us the value of it is it helps us remember our past while we try to get into the mainstream."
'Revolting and Dismal Chapter'
The past for the Cherokees was a rich one. Along with the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole of the southeast, they were referred to by settlers as the "five civilized tribes." They were accomplished farmers, lived in well-constructed log homes, and in the 1820's established a written language, constitution, and newspaper.
But pressure from Georgia settlers desiring their land and eventually the Federal Government led to their forced removal to the west. Hopkinsvilee was one of the few established settlements on the Trail of Tears, but David Riley, head of the local historical society, said there was little in the offical town records marking the passage.
"It seems it wasn't an earthshaking event for the town fathers," he said, adding that the huge Midwestern earthquake of 1814 and even the Civil War also received scant attention.
Gravestones in the Trees
Diaries from the time, he said, contain only clinical accounts of how Hopkinsville opened its churchs to the Cherokees, provided medical assistance and observed the many deaths among the tribe.
"It seems as if we were just interested bystanders with a front row seat," Mr. Riley said. "We can't put our finger on just what the feeling was. The Trail of Tears is a revolting and dismal chapter in our history when we look at it today but then it seems people just took it in their stride."
The fieldstone grave markers of the Cherokee chiefs, White Path and Fly Smith, were uncovered in 1954 by a local homeowner clearing honeysuckle and saw briar from the edge of his backyard in a subdivision called Cherokee Park. The homeowner, Woodrow Hunter, planted bluegrass around the moss-covered stones, which now rest inconspicuously just across his property line in a stand of locust and wild cherry trees.
Mrs. Baker said the Trail of Tears Commission had acquired seven acres surrounding the graves, but had yet to buy the actual site from its owner, The Kentucky New Ear newspaper.
But already she and Mayor Tommy Gates can envision what the memorial will look like: a small museum and winding paths to the gravesites' marked with statuary. It will be tastefull, not too commerical, she said, and as accurate as research on Cherokees will allow.
Wallace Brittain, a spokesman for the National Park Service's regional office in Atlanta said the designation did not automatically mean Federal financing. But Mrs. Baker said the city would construct a memorial if the Government did not.
"One of our purposes is to educate people," Mrs. Baker said. "It is important for this reason that it come from non-Indians. So many of us have grown up not knowing anything about the Eastern Indian tribes."