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      Beyond the Cherokee Trail

      Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Carter

      Published by Abingdon Press, 2222 Rosa L. Parks Blvd.,

       PO Box 280988, Nashville, TN 37228-0988

      www.abingdonpress.com

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form

       stored in any retrieval system, posted on any website,

       or transmitted in any form or by any means—digital,

       electronic, scanning, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without

       written permission from the publisher, except for brief

       quotations in printed reviews and articles.

      The persons and events portrayed in this work of fiction

       are the creations of the author, and any resemblance

       to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

      Macro Editor: Teri Wilhelms

      Published in association with the Steve Laube Agency

      Poetry Excerpt, Chapter 29: Copyright © 1998 by Wendell Berry from A Timbered Choir. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Carter, Lisa, 1964-

      Beyond the Cherokee trail / Lisa Carter.

      1 online resource.

      Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

      ISBN 978-1-4267-9547-3 (e-pub) -- ISBN 978-1-4267-9546-6 (binding: soft back)

      I. Title.

      PS3603.A77757

      813'.6--dc23

      2015010493

      Dedication

      Dedication

      To my Aunt Julia—Thank you for your encouragement through the years. Your smile lights our family gatherings. Thanks for contributing what became one of my favorite Ross lines the day we ate barbeque at your house. I love you.

      Readers—Blessings to you and I hope this special place in the mountains of North Carolina and the Snowbird people will capture your imagination and grip your heart as they do mine. Though the characters in this story are fictional, the historic events recounted are not.

      This story is not mine, but one of those things which you know beyond a shadow of a doubt is God’s story. An eternal story of His mercy and grace, not just to Linden, Sarah, Walker, Pierce, Touch the Clouds, or Leila, but to all who’ve been broken and felt abandoned by the guilt of their transgressions or the pain of loss.

      If you’ve ever felt unwanted or unloved or weary, God invites you to come. Because in Christ, there are no outcasts.

      My prayer for you today, if you’ve fallen or if you grieve, is that you would discover for yourself the God of all peace and all comfort. That you would lay hold of the God who offers grace in the hour of your greatest need.

      And Beyond.

      Acknowledgments

      Acknowledgments

      For his help in the historical research of this project I’d like to thank T.J. Holland, Cultural Resources Manager for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina and curator of the tribally owned Junaluska Museum. A renown Snowbird Cherokee artist, he patiently answered my many questions and helped me to locate what remains of the Tatham Gap Road where the gouged wagon ruts made on the Trail can still be seen. Deep in the woods outside Robbinsville, it is a painfully beautiful yet slightly haunting place. As if the earth itself remembers the suffering of those who once trod this path.

      Jesus—Here I raise my Ebenezer. By Your help I’ve come. You are the beginning and the end of my journey. For truly the further we travel together, the sweeter comes the end.

      Epigraph

      So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens

       with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household.

      Ephesians 2:19 CEB

      Therefore, let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace,

       so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

      Hebrews 4:16 NASB

      Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

       the Father of mercies, and the God of all consolation.

      2 Corinthians 1:3 KJV (1833)

      Reader’s Note

      Reader’s Note

      In 1835, members of a minority faction of the Cherokee Nation brokered a compromise settlement with the United States’ government known as the Treaty of New Echota, ceding its claims to the entire Cherokee Nation in the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. The treaty agreed to the removal of all Cherokee citizens to beyond the Mississippi River in Indian Territory. This deal—without the official authorization of the Cherokee National Council—became the legal basis for the enforced removal of an entire ethnic group from the only home in which their people had lived, farmed, and roamed for hundreds of years.

      John Ross traveled between New Echota and Washington urging President Andrew Jackson to reconsider. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Davy Crockett among others argued for the Cherokees’ right to stay. But Congress ratified the agreement in 1836 in the face of mounting pressure to seize the valuable Cherokee lands. And although the Supreme Court upheld many of the Cherokee claims, the fate of the Cherokee Nation had been sealed once gold was discovered within its borders.

      The government granted the Cherokees two years to prepare themselves to be removed. But Ross promised an eleventh-hour intervention. And so, in May 1838, most of the Cherokee were caught completely unaware. With crops planted in the field, laundry hanging on the line, breakfast waiting on the table . . . soldiers appeared at their doors.

      Of the sixteen thousand removed—a virtual death march—six thousand men, women, and children perished along the twelve- hundred-mile route that became known as the Trail of Tears or Trail Where We Cried. The removal ensured the land, which had been their ancestral birthplace, would become nothing more than an oft-repeated story around hearth fires of a time and

       a place revered and longed for, but outside the scope of living memory. The Trail came to symbolize the oppression of all Native Americans in the American expansion to the Pacific Ocean.

      In the isolated mountain terrain of western North Carolina in what today comprises the Qualla Boundary near the town of Cherokee, some refused to surrender to removal. These few hundred became the Eastern Band of the Cherokee.

      An even smaller number secreted in a pocket of the rugged Snowbird Mountains—still considered one of the last wilderness regions within the United States—also successfully eluded

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