The Cherokees lived in North Georgia, near Calhoun.
After the murder of Old Tassel and other chiefs in northwestern South Carolina, Little Turkey was elected chief of the Cherokee as well as to the seat of the Cherokee Council, which was removed from Chota to Ustanali. The new council seat was named New Echota and was the capital of the Cherokee Nation from 1825 to their forced removal in the 1830s. Today, this site is a State Park and Historic Site which is located North of Calhoun and South of Resaca, Georgia, and is situated at the confluence of the Coosawattee and Conasauga Rivers.
The tribal council was actively engaged in building a their town in North Georgia. They constructed a two-story Council House, Supreme Court, and later a printer shop where the first Cherokee newspaper was regularly printed. The editor and printer, Elias Boudinot, was the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, written in the Cherokee language. The original issues of this newspaper have been preserved and are available at the Cobb Regional Library in Marietta, Georgia.
After the Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1832, this territory was included in Georgia’s Sixth Land Lottery, thus allocating Cherokee lands to white settlers. The Cherokee’s never ceded the land to the State!
The Cherokees claimed North Georgia and Southern Tennessee as their homeland. Over the next six years, the Georgia Guard operated against the Cherokee, evicting them from their properties. By 1834, New Echota was a “ghost town”.
Council meetings were removed to Red Clay, the Cherokee Nation in Tennessee. By 1818, the Chickasaws had ceded their land away by Treaty to the State of Tennessee, and in the 1830s, most of the Cherokees in Tennessee had been forced to go to Oklahoma.
The Dawes Records (ca 1903) are the most informative insofar as people in Georgia and Tennessee attempting to claim a 1/32nd blood kinship for free to those Indians in Oklahoma. The gain was free land in Oklahoma. Thus, some 35,000 applications were given to the Commission. It should be noted that Indians kept Rolls, and that most of these applications were unable to prove lineage.
It should also be noted that some marriages occurred between the white man and squaws, and that it is probable that a goodly number of such marriaged persons remained behind.
Listed below are the Indian records available online at Georgia Pioneers.com
1835 Henderson Rolls
1906 Guin Miller Rolls
1851 Chapman Rolls (includes counties of Cass, Chatham, Cherokee, Cobb, DeKalb, Forsyth, Gilmer, Gordon, Gwinnett, Lumpkin, Murray, Union and Walker.
1909 Cherokee ENrolees to be struck from the Roll
1910 Cherokee Judgment Roll Fund
1910 Cherokee Roll East of the Mississippi River
1833 Cherokee Oaths (Cherokees who took the Oath to remain in Georgia)
1835 New Echota Residents (Cherokees) who requested a Militia Unit to keep order among the Cherokees
General Index to Eastern Cherokee Applications A to K
1835 Forsyth County Census
1832 Supreme Court Case of Samuel A. Worcester, Plaintiff in Error
1828 Cherokee Phoenix Newspapers, Echota
Cherokee Genealogies Traced — alphabetical by Surname