An Opinion of Convenience Traditional Cache
Bioknee: Retiring from geocaching.
An Opinion of Convenience
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This cache is placed to highlight a very significant part of the history of this area. Parking is available, but limited. BYOP.
Before “colonial” settlement, Clay County was home to the Cherokee Indians, a tribe of Native Americans that made their home in Georgia, the Carolinas, and Eastern Tennessee. At that time, they were considered one of the "Five Civilized Tribes", because of their assimilation of European-American cultural and technological practices.
George Washington believed that Native Americans were equals, but that their society was inferior. He formulated a policy to encourage the "civilizing" process, and Thomas Jefferson continued it. The noted Andrew Jackson historian Robert Remini wrote "they presumed that once the Indians adopted the practice of private property, built homes, farmed, educated their children, and embraced Christianity, these Native Americans would win acceptance from white Americans.
Washington's six-point plan included impartial justice toward Indians; regulated buying of Indian lands; promotion of commerce; promotion of experiments to civilize or improve Indian society; presidential authority to give presents; and punishing those who violated Indian rights. The government appointed agents, like Benjamin Hawkins, to live among the Indians and to teach them, through example and instruction, how to live like whites. The tribes of the southeast adopted Washington's policy as they established schools, adopted yeoman farming practices, converted to Christianity, and built homes like their colonial neighbors.
Despite these efforts to “civilize” the natives and their willingness to adapt, in late May 1838, members of the U.S. Army entered the Cherokee homelands in western North Carolina, physically removed thousands of Cherokee residents from their homes and marched them to a series of six nearby, impromptu forts or camps before transporting them into Oklahoma Territory. One such stockade was named Fort Hembree, which served as a local interment center for the Spikebuck, Tusquitee, and Shooting Creek communities.
For those thousands rounded up, this was the beginning of the Trail of Tears.
Of Washington’s policy, Henry Knox wrote to the President,
“How different would be the sensation of a philosophic mind to reflect that instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population that we had persevered through all difficulties and at last had imparted our Knowledge of cultivating and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country by which the source of future life and happiness had been preserved and extended. But it has been conceived to be impracticable to civilize the Indians of North America - This opinion is probably more convenient than just.”
Such an enormous, far-reaching decision made based on an opinion of convenience...
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(Decrypt)
Anu!
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