Lance Greene is a Professor of Anthropology at Wright State University. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an historical archaeologist who specializes in Native American archaeology and history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much of Dr. Greene’s research has focused on the Cherokee Trail of Tears in North Carolina and how Cherokees found ways to evade deportation and maintain their communities. He is also doing research on Piqua, a late-18th century Shawnee town in southern Ohio. His research has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and his book, Their Determination to Remain, was published earlier this year by University of Alabama Press.

Countless examples of Native American resistance to forced migration during the Removal-era of the 1830s, important events in American history, have yet to be told. The evasion of deportation by several hundred Cherokees in North Carolina in 1838 is an extraordinary episode of resistance. Hiding in the mountains, they outlasted the US Army, although suffering incalculable loss. After the army left the region, around 100 of these people established Welch’s Town along the Valley River. There they maintained a traditional community for almost 15 years, until federal pressure to move westward had subsided. Historic documents and material culture from archaeological excavations are used to tell the story of the Welch’s Town Cherokee.

A lot of people are now starting to do this kind of research—historians, archaeologists, Native researchers—and looking at those stories that haven’t been told. Certainly, there’s been a lot written about the Cherokee removal and other ones, but they often have to do with the leaders in these nations. They have to do with the trail itself—the trail that went on to Oklahoma. These stories are a little harder to sort out, but people are starting to find out that there are dozens of these examples, including in the Cherokee Nation, of groups of dozens or a few hundred people staying behind. This is an extraordinary story because these are people who organized and outlasted both the edict of the federal government and the U.S. Army. This is an extraordinary tale.

That’s initially what got me interested, and then I started reading about some of these individual families. It’s interesting when you read this because you learn a lot about not only large populations but also individual families and individual people, making it very personal. I started learning about the Welch family. They were unusual in Western North Carolina in the 1830s. This is in the northern part of the Cherokee Nation in the 1820s and 30s, and they were unusual for several reasons. John Welch was a Cherokee man married to Elizabeth or Betty Welch, a white woman. That wasn’t so unusual, but what was really interesting is that in the 1820s and 30s, they ran a large southern plantation in the mountains of North Carolina. In the Cherokee Nation, at least in this part, it was very unusual. You had strongholds of traditional Cherokees who mostly rejected Christianity, surplus wealth, and capitalism. They practiced the harmony ethic, were involved in town-level governance, and rejected the Cherokee Nation as a large body.

The Welches farmed about 150 acres, raised livestock, and enslaved nine African Americans at the time of removal. This is a really unusual family within this group of traditional Cherokees. It becomes even more interesting when the removal got to that point in the summer of 1838, and hundreds of Cherokees were fleeing into the mountains. The Welches helped some of those people survive by sending them food, clothing, and information about troop movements. It’s interesting because they could have ridden out the removal without much problem. There was a white person in the family, which gave them a lot of privilege. They also had an exemption pass, and John Welch claimed U.S. citizenship through the 1819 reservation. So why did they risk their livelihood and lives to help these people, especially when they seemed to have different backgrounds or ideologies?

That’s one of the questions I asked: what is the relationship that these people are practicing? I was also interested in why, out of a tribe of about 16,000 people, three or four hundred made the effort to run to the mountains, hide, and stay behind. I won’t talk about that too much because it was covered very well a couple of nights ago, but this is what I was interested in. In my book research, I start during the removal and go through the narrative using historic documents, mostly Army records. We see very clearly what’s happening between all these different communities, including the Welches. Then I look at what happens after the removal. The Welch family created a space known as Welch’s Town on their farm, where between 90 and 125 Cherokees lived for about 15 years after removal.

I look into that story as well. On the Welch Farm, which was about 1300 acres, they created a space where three communities lived: the Welch family, Welch’s Town up in an elevated area, and a small enslaved African-American community of eight, nine, or ten individuals. I talk about how these different groups interacted with each other.

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Just a very brief background to set the context: this is the Cherokee Nation up until 1838. You have the districts set up by the Cherokee Nation. In those first decades of the 19th century, a schism was forming within the Cherokee Nation. The vast majority of Cherokees wanted to remain traditional, maintaining town-level governance, the clan system, matrilineal descent, and traditional practices. But there was a small but powerful minority that wanted to westernize, whether to avoid more land cessions or to gain personal wealth. This schism developed in the years leading up to the removal.

From an archaeological standpoint, these ideological and cultural differences are often reflected in material culture. For example, the swimmer cabin photographed by James Mooney in 1888 shows a small, single-room log cabin that served most Cherokee families well. In contrast, the Joseph Vance house in northern Georgia, one of the largest plantations in the Cherokee Nation in the 1820s and 30s, represents a very different lifestyle. The pottery also shows differences: a handmade Cherokee pot on the left versus a piece of blue shell-edge china found at the Welch site, produced in England. These artifacts represent different cultural practices.