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Native Ground
In the 1830s, the United States deported eighty thousand Indigenous Americans from their homelands east of the Mississippi River. Native Ground maps in depth and detail the Cherokee families who lost their homes in that decade, creating a virtual representation of the Cherokee Nation just before the U.S. Army rounded up its sixteen thousand citizens and forced them westward.
Native Ground draws on two main sources: valuations and property returns. In 1836, the federal government sent teams of valuators (akin to property appraisers) to the Cherokee Nation to catalog every single cabin, corncrib, barn, and smokehouse. Valuators noted whether logs were round, hewn, or sculped, tallied the number of windows, described how chimneys were constructed, evaluated the type of roofing, and measured the dimensions of each building. They counted the number of apple, peach, pawpaw, and other fruit trees under cultivation and assessed each acre of farmland, appraising the fertility of the soil and the quality of the fencing. In 1838, still another team of federal agents, property assessors, moved through the Cherokee Nation, this time to enumerate all personal property, including pots, plows, bags of dried fruit, fiddles, fishing hooks, and canoes. Some of the records contain detailed information about who evicted the family and when. We have entered all of these records into a database and located the homesites as best as possible. You can explore the map and database using the tabs at the top of this page.A project of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia, Native Ground thanks the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts for their support.
