But now a UNC-Chapel Hill archaeologist, using shovels and aged government ledgers, is piecing together the lost history of Cherokees forcibly removed from North Carolina 167 years ago.

Brett Riggs has unearthed remains of 30 Cherokee farms in Clay, Cherokee and Graham counties, 300 miles west of Raleigh. He locates remnants of roads that Cherokees took on their journey west. He pinpoints where Army forts used during the eviction once stood.

His work is strengthening the case that old North Carolina roads should be included on the official map of the Trail of Tears, a commemorative route in the making that extends only as far east as Tennessee.

But more important to Riggs, it restores a displaced people -- at least on paper -- to their land, a place where their ancestors lived and died for at least 1,000 years.

"We have to be realistic about the history," Riggs said at a Cherokee farm excavation at Chatuge Lake near the Georgia border earlier this month. "This was ethnic cleansing, in America."

Farms, roads, churches

In many ways, the Cherokee life in southwestern North Carolina resembled that of Anglo-American settlers of the 1830s. Families lived in log cabins or, occasionally, wooden homes. Many tended farm crops, orchards and livestock. Some manufactured bricks or other goods. Some of the very richest owned slaves.

"This was a land of farms, roads, churches and schools, not a howling wilderness with people living in tepees," Riggs said.

Yet the people remained distinctly Cherokee. Divided into traditional tribal towns and clans, they spoke and wrote native languages. People practiced religious ceremonies together. The Cherokee Nation, not the U.S. government, represented them.

The 1830 federal Indian Removal Act, intended to clear native people from lands east of the Mississippi River, doomed the settlements. So did a land sale treaty signed by a small faction of Cherokee.

Cherokees who hid in the mountains or obtained legal exemption to removal won recognition as the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation in 1868, still intact today. But others either perished en route or started over again in Oklahoma, known then as Indian Territory.

Digging for treasure

In preparing to move the Cherokees and then sell the land to white settlers, the United States collected volumes of information on the native people occupying southwestern North Carolina. The Army did so because the community was well-organized and was expected to resist expulsion.

The Army surveyed the locations of farms; counted who lived there, usually recording the name of just one male; and appraised the value of their farm fields, livestock and dwellings.

Riggs uses the documents and other clues to find Cherokee farms, and to try to figure out who once lived there. But he never knows for sure until he digs.

This month, he and three other archaeologists and a technician excavated a field on the edge of Chatuge Lake, 100 miles southwest of Asheville. Lakefront parcels near what may have been Artowee's farm have sold for $500,000 apiece.

Two UNC graduate students uncovered a pit likely dug under a hot house, the shelters Cherokee built to survive the worst of the cold during Appalachian winters.

Just yards away they had found pieces of Cherokee pots, used to prepare traditional foods such as sour corn soup, and bits of hand-painted everyday china, made in Staffordshire, England.

The china could easily have been purchased by Cherokee at a general store once located nearby, Riggs said. The graduate students stored the fragments in numbered brown paper bags, along with a broken piece of a metal hand mirror, a chunk of a boar's tusk, a piece of pipe carved from soft stone, bits of glass and more.

With shovels and sharpened trowels, they also hunted for a larger pit, the type of cellar Cherokee farmers always put under their cabins. "There has to be a pit here somewhere," said Mark Plane, one of the graduate students, digging a long-handled shovel into loosened dirt by the lake.

When they didn't find a cabin pit, Riggs concluded that remains of the farm's cabins probably are under Chatuge Lake, which was created in the 1940s for flood control.

Trail gains momentum

What was found will be offered as evidence to the case that North Carolina roads should be part of the commemorative Trail of Tears that the National Park Service is developing. Congress created the trail in 1987 with the stated purpose of remembering a tragic period of U.S. history. Only recently, however, has its development picked up steam.

Covering portions of about 2,200 miles, the routes pass through eight states, but the easternmost route starts at the historic site of an emigration center near Fort Cass, northeast of Chattanooga, Tenn. A bill before Congress, co-sponsored by U.S. Rep Charles Taylor, R-Brevard, among others, asks the Secretary of the Interior to certify more stretches, including routes in southwestern North Carolina.

What Riggs has found over seven years is also a deepening understanding of 19th century Cherokee life before removal, said Aaron Mahr Yánez, a historian with the park service's National Trails System in New Mexico.

"It's path-breaking. He's found roadside inns, mail stops, cottage production of bricks and carpentry," Mahr Yánez said. "It helps us understand."

Cherokee people are watching closely too. Occasionally, Riggs hears from a native person living in Oklahoma or elsewhere who intends to make a pilgrimage to an ancestor's home site he has uncovered.

"He's not only preserving our heritage, he's making us more aware of it," said Jack Baker, a retired Cherokee accountant in Oklahoma City who leads the Trail of Tears Association. "He's saying, this is where they lived. This is the way they lived. This is how the roundup occurred."

Memorial sites benefit

T.J. Holland manages the Eastern Band-funded Junaluska Memorial Site and Museum in Robbinsville, recently certified as a Trail of Tears interpretive site. He is drawing from Riggs' work to develop new displays on the Cherokee eviction and the people who resisted it.

"We need this validation for people to take us seriously," Holland said.

Later this month, Riggs and graduate student Lance Greene will return to Western North Carolina to hunt for more farms and historic roads. They'll work mostly U.S. Forest Service land, where the chances are better that entire farmsteads can be excavated.

Riggs figures the nation owes it to the Cherokee people forced out, including the men whose names the U.S. agents recorded in preparation to take their land. Snail, Acooah, Jerry Tucker, Tahchuah, Keenaneetah, Oowahwahsieta and Artowee among them.

And to many more whose names were never written down.

Staff writer Catherine Clabby can be reached at 956-2414 or