The Cherokees of the Smoky Mountains

This is the dramatic history of the Cherokee Indians, a politically and economically advanced tribe that inhabited a vast area of the southeastern United States, from central South Carolina to northern Kentucky.  In the Great Smoky Mountain region, their post-contact past is filled with triumph and tragedy, from the invention of a written language and the publication of a tribal newspaper, to their forced march to Oklahoma on the infamous “Trail of Tears.”