"Our county and surrounding counties are rich in historical events and people. The earliest inhabitants were indigenous people, of which the Me-Wuk tribe is locally the largest and best known. Our history records another Native American People, the Cherokee that populated an area within Tuolumne County in the era of the Gold Rush sometime around the early 1850s.

The Cherokee Nation was one of the five recognized “civilized nations” of American Indians. Located in Georgia, they became early victims of the westward expansion of young America. It began as early as 1802, when “The Compact of 1802” was signed between Georgia and the federal government. It stated that Georgia would relinquish its western land claims (which later became Alabama and Mississippi) to the national government in return that someday the national government would negotiate treaties with the Indians and eventually relocate them outside the borders of Georgia, thus giving Georgia control of all land within its borders. In 1828 gold was discovered in Georgia and Cherokee people began to see their lands trespassed upon. By 1838, the federal government, ignoring the sovereignty of the Cherokee, began a forced relocation out of Georgia to reservations in Indian Territory, which later became Oklahoma Territory, some 1200 miles west. About 16,000 Cherokee, along with about 2,000 black slaves owned by wealthy Cherokee were moved to concentration camps and then along three major routes into the Indian Territory. Approximately 4,000 died along the trail, thus giving rise to the description, “The Trail of Tears”.

History tells of a group of Cherokee that set out for California in 1848, looking for new settlement lands. The expedition followed the Arkansas River upstream to the Rocky Mountains in present day Colorado, and then followed the base of the mountains northward into present day Wyoming before turning westward. The route became known as the Cherokee Trail, or the Rocky Mountain Trail. The group (or at least some) undertook gold prospecting in California."

Get the Story:
Tracing the Cherokee People West to Tuolumne County, California (The Sierra Mountain Times 10/23)