Then, in the 1790s, the steamboat was invented. In its early years steamboats weren’t too powerful, and many people weren’t sure if they would ever be able to operate on fast-moving rivers such as the Cumberland and Tennessee. Finally, in March 1819 the first steamboat ever arrived in Nashville. It was called the General Jackson.

Within a few years most of the trade that had previously been operating on flatboats had shifted to steamboats, and there were dozens of them that ran up and down the Cumberland River. No longer was it necessary to float down the river and come back home by road, which is why the Natchez Trace lost its significance.

The steamboat was a great invention, but its emergence didn't necessarily mean that every city on a river could be reached easily with them. Steamboats are big and wide, and water has to be about three to five feet deep for a steamboat to make it through. Back in those days, before dams were built up and down the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, there were many places along the river where the water wasn’t deep enough for a steamboat. A few miles northwest of Nashville, for instance, was a place called Harpeth Shoals. This area was so shallow that steamboats would frequently run aground there (in fact, many steamboats would stop just below Harpeth Shoals and let all their cargo and passengers out there).

After that, the only part of Tennessee still left to Native Americans was the southeast part that was owned by the Cherokees. The Cherokees also still inhabited large parts of western North Carolina and northwest Georgia.   

By this time many Cherokees had adapted white culture. The Cherokees were no longer on the warpath. Many Cherokees had large farms and sold goods at market just like other farmers; while there were Cherokees working as blacksmiths, tailors, and other things. The Cherokees had largely adopted the Christian religion, and some of them had even fought on the American side in the war of 1812 and the Creek War of 1813-14. And, thanks to Sequoyah, the Cherokees now had a written language and their own newspaper.

Nevertheless, Americans still wanted all of the Cherokees’ land – call it greed if you must. Many leaders in and Tennessee felt this way. One of them, Andrew Jackson, was elected president in 1828. Jackson generally hated Native Americans, describing them as “immoral” and “wandering savages” – although he could be kind to them on an individual basis. He had fought against them many times – most notably at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in present-day Alabama, when he led an army that defeated the Creeks.

The same year Jackson was elected, a Cherokee boy discovered gold in northwest Georgia – right in the middle of the Cherokee land. As soon as this happened, white prospectors (people looking to find gold) poured into the area. Some whites, hoping to run the Cherokees off of their land, began sneaking onto Cherokee country and plundering and burning homes in an attempt to run them off. The Cherokees of northwest Georgia lost the legal battle that followed, and by 1832 members of the tribe were prohibited from engaging in political activity within the state of Georgia, which is why the tribe shifted its capital to Red Clay -- just north of the Tennessee/Georgia state line.

On May 28, 1830, President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, requiring all Native Americans to leave their homes and move west of the Mississippi River. Many Cherokees refused to go, and filed a lawsuit against the government to stop this from taking place. That lawsuit went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the Cherokees had every right to remain on their land. But Jackson refused to do what the Supreme Court told him to. “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has rendered his decision," Jackson said. “Let him enforce it.”

By 1838 many Native Americans of various tribes had given up and moved west, while others still refused. But in May of that year the federal government began rounding them up and forcing them to go west, in an event that we now call the Trail of Tears.   

Here is how one book describes what happened when American troops showed up to remove the Cherokees:   

"Without warning, the troops burst into Cherokee homes, dragged the people outside, and drove them toward staging camps. Anyone moving too slowly was prodded by a soldier’s bayonet. Following almost on the heels of the soldiers came neighboring whites who swept up the Cherokee’s personal possessions just as soon as the soldiers had forced the Indians from their homes. Like pirates, the whites stuffed sacks with pots, pans, silverware, and musical instruments, all looted from Cherokee houses and cabins."

After being packed into “staging areas” – generally nothing more than fenced-in areas guarded by soldiers – around 16,000 Cherokees were marched northwest from present-day Chattanooga up through Murfreesboro, Nashville, and Clarksville and into Kentucky, enroute to present-day Oklahoma. The journey took over a year and a half, and it is estimated that one in four of the people who traveled this route died along the way.

Many years later, an old soldier had this to say about what he saw during the removal of the Native Americans. “I fought through the Civil War and I have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”

Click here for a remarkable account of how one Cherokee man and his wife escaped during the Trail of Tears and made it back to their homeland.

QUIZ

3. (TRUE OR FALSE) The U. S. Supreme court backed President Andrew Jackson’s decision to forcibly remove Native Americans from Tennessee. 

ASSIGNMENT: Go to the library and see if you can track down copies of old, old Tennessee maps that show how the state’s boundaries changed between 1796 and 1818.