Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

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Great Smoky Mountains National Park

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Item’s are ‘child’ level descriptions to ‘parent’ objects, (e.g. one page of a whole book).

  • unchanged from the days of Chaucer's Pilgrim. The mountain stock is pure Anglo-Saxon and the coves know well the echoes of old Scottish ballads, not written, but handed down from generation to generation. Mountain men still scrape their fiddles in lively old tunes, and pioneer crafts of spinning, weaving, pottery and basket making still survive. Visitors will be interested in the Cherokee Indians on the Qualla Reservation. Here live the largest band of Indians east of the Mississippi. For hundreds of years this tribe, believed to be an offshoot of the famous Iroquois, controlled eastern Tennessee and parts of four adjacent states. Their history is tragic. The Indians upon the Reservation today are the descendants of a few hundred who fled to the craggy wilderness of the Smokies in 1836 when Col. Win- field Scott, later the hero of the Mexican War, directed the removal of the tribe of nearly 15,000 to the plains of Oklahoma. The "Great Removal" as it is known among the Cherokee of both the east and west, is also known as "The Trail of Tears," for on that forced pilgrimage, in the dead of winter, four thousand of these people died. Had it not been for the sacrifice of the great Cherokee hero, Tsali, and his three sons, who gave their lives at that time of the removal that a few of their people might remain in their native mountain land, there would be no Cherokee Nation today in the shadow of the Smokies. Although the Government has instituted here a comprehensive system of education and modern methods of living, ancient ceremonies and sports are still preserved as tribal customs. The Indians
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).