The First Tennesseans

The First Tennesseans. . , Perennially gathered around the river valleys, for 12,000 years people have found Tennessee to be a desirable place to live. , Map of heaviest concentrations of prehistoric peoples and historic tribes based on data from the Tennessee Dept of Environment and Conservation Divot Archaeology and the Tennessee State Museum., Chickasaw who primarily lived outside the boundaries of the stated hunted [illegible] West Tennessee and shared hunting grounds in Middle Tennessee with the Cherokee. By 1818, Chickasaws had ceded to the United States all claims in Tennessee. , In a treat of 1830, Chickasaws were promised "a country suitable to their wants and conditions." If they would agree to migrate across the Mississippi River. Mandatory relocation to the future Oklahoma began in 1837 and by 1838 almost no Chickasaw remained. , Shawneewere active hunters and traders in the Cumberland River Valley. They were driven out of future Tennessee in the early 18th Century by the Cherokees and Chickasaws who sought abundant Middle Tennessee game., Prehistoric people probably arrived in Tennessee around 10,000 B.C> They were small bands of nomadic Ice Age hunters who camped all over the state. Around 8,000 B.C. native people of the Archaic era were more settled and dependent for subsistence upon rivers and gathering or natural vegetation. Small villages and innovations, such as the bow and arrow, pottery, and burial mounds [illegible] around 300 B.C., in the Woodland period, stability of place, increased [illegible] order, and an agricultural way of life are hallmarks of the Mississippian culture that peaked around 1450 A.D. and vanished around 1600. Flat topped Mississippian mounds used for ceremonial purposes remain. Archaeology has not yet revealed what happened to the last link in this chain of earliest "Tennesseans," nor what relationship, if any, they bear to historic Cherokee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Creek peoples. , Creek in Tennessee were part of a large and powerful confederation of numerous tribes who spoke different but related languages. Concentrated in the south central region of the state, with some settlement in the Chattanooga area they were driven out of Tennessee by the Cherokee in the early 18th century., Cherokee by the early 1700s were the largest tribe in the south, with approximately 50-80 towns (estimated total population of 22,000) scattered in the southern Appalachian Mountains. The Overhill Cherokees were so named because they lived over the "hills" from the heart of the Cherokee Nation in North Carolina. Relations with the increasing number of European pioneers during the early 1800s varied between friendly and deadly. President Andrew Jackson enforced the treaty of New Echota calling for removal to the west of Cherokee in 1838. Approximately 4,000 of the 17,000 Cherokees and their slaves died as a result of the [illegible] to Oklahoma, now known as the Trail of Tears. By 1840, only about 1,000 resistant Cherokee, the last Native Americans in Tennessee remained in their mountains.