Cherokee once lived in the southern Appalachians. In the eighteenth century, they claimed hunting grounds that extended into Kentucky, but they clustered their villages and agricultural fields in the valleys of upcountry South Carolina, western North Carolina, east Tennessee, north Georgia, and northeastern Alabama, they also spoke four mutually intelligible dialects of an Iroquoian. There were ten million Native Americans on this continent when the first non-Indians arrived. Over the next 300 years, 90 percent of all Native American original population was either wiped out by disease, famire, or warfare imported by the whites. Nineteenth century, the United States forced the Cherokee Nation to surrender its homeland and relocate west of the Mississippi witch is the event known as the trail of tears. The term “Trail of tears.” A rough translation of the Cherokee nunna dual tsung, describes the trek of heart broken people to their new homes in the west. The discovery of the new world by European explorers caused endless problems for American Indians, whose homelands were gradually taken from them and whose cultures were dramatically altered, and in some cases destroyed, by the invasion.
By the next two centuries more and more white settlers arrived, and the native cultures responded to pressures to adopt the foreign ways, leading to the deterioration of their own culture. During the colonial period Indian tribes often became embroiled in European colonial wars. If they were on the losing side, they frequently had to give up parts of their homelands. After the American Revolution the Indian’s faced another set of problems. Even though it took time for the new government to establish a policy for dealing with the Indians, the precedent had been set during the colonial period. The insatiable desire of white settlers for lands occupied by Indian people