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Their Determination to Remain
The remarkable story of a North Carolina Cherokee
community who avoided forced removal on the Trail of
Tears During the 1838 forced Cherokee removal by
the US government, a number of close-knit Cherokee communities in
the Southern Appalachian Mountains refused to relinquish their
homelands, towns, and way of life. Using a variety of tactics,
hundreds of Cherokees avoided the encroaching US Army and
remained in the region. In his book
Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s
Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, Lance
Greene explores the lives of wealthy plantation owners Betty and
John Welch who lived on the southwestern edge of the Cherokee
Nation. John was Cherokee and Betty was White. Although few
Cherokees in the region participated in slavery, the Welches held
nine African Americans in bondage. During removal, the Welches
assisted roughly 100 Cherokees hiding in the steep mountains.
Afterward, they provided land for these Cherokees to rebuild a
new community, Welch’s Town. Betty became a wealthy and
powerful plantation mistress because her husband could no longer
own land. Members of Welch’s Town experienced a
transitional period in which they had no formal tribal government
or clear citizenship yet felt secure enough to reestablish a
townhouse, stickball fields, and dance grounds. Greene’s
innovative study uses an interdisciplinary approach,
incorporating historical narrative and archaeological data, to
examine how and why the Welches and members of Welch’s Town
avoided expulsion and reestablished their ways of life in the
midst of a growing White population who resented a continued
Cherokee presence. The Welch strategy included Betty’s
leadership in demonstrating outwardly their participation in
modern Western lifestyles, including enslavement, as John
maintained a hidden space—within the boundaries of their
land—for the continuation of traditional Cherokee cultural
practices.
Their Determination to Remain explores the complexities
of race and gender in this region of the antebellum South and the
real impacts of racism on the community.
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