BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT
FRIDAY AUGUST 4, 1893
FROM CHEROKEE LAND
[Special Correspondence of the Transcript]
Cherokee, N.C.
.....The men are now duly qualified citizens of the United States, but alas! it is with them as with a large body of voters elsewhere, their chief interest in the matter is in the buying of their votes. They have their own council and elect their own Chief, and, I think, have a code of laws their own. Ex Chief Smith is said to be a man of a good deal of intelligence. He is ill at present, but I have seehn his pictured face, and it is a striking one. the features are of the finest Caucasian type, the gaze piercing and intelligent, and upon the shoulders hangs a profusion of long and picturesque ringlets. I said to myself, "This is not a modern face of the every-day world; it does not belong to any race admixture of which I know anything; it might have belonged to a Spanish cavalier of the olden time;" and as if in answer to my thought came the information that there was an admixture of Portuguese blood in his veins, or to speak in vernacular, he was "part Portygee." Mine host is inclined to ridicule this idea, and to account for the curly hair on an African basis, but there is not the slightest suggestion of the negro in Smith's face or in the faces of any of his children or grandchildren whom I have seen. Affiliation between these two races is rare, the negroes and Indians usully holding toward one another the proverbial cat and dog relation
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"As principal chief Smith devoted most of his time to the Eastern Cherokee's legal battles. Hoping to gain access to the annuities and other trust funds held by the U.S. government for the Western (Oklahoma) Cherokee, the Eastern Cherokee filed suit in the court of claims against the United States and the Cherokee Nation West in 1883. Two years later the court handed down a decision adverse to the Eastern Cherokee, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1886. The courts ruled that the Eastern Cherokee had dissolved their connection with the Cherokee Nation by their refusal to move west. The decision deprived them not only of the trust and annuity funds but also of their tribal status and consequently left them in an extremely ambiguous legal position."
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See
The wagonauts abroad : two tours in the wild mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, made by three kegs, four wagonauts and a canteen, in two parts. Nashville, Tenn.: Southwestern Publishing House. 1892 Page 225
https://archive.org/details/wagonautsabroadt00doak/page/224/mode/2up?view=theater
