This volume presents the story of the Eastern Band of Cherokees during the nineteenth century. This group - the tribal remnant in North Carolina that escaped removal in the 1830's - found their fortitude and resilience continually tested as they struggled with a variety of problems, including the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction, internal divisiveness, white encroachment on their lands, and a poorly defined relationship with the state and federal governments. Yet despite such stresses and a selective adaptation in the face of social and economic changes, the Eastern Cherokees retained a sense of tribal identity as they stood at the threshold of the twentieth century.

Much has been written about the forced removal of thousands of Cherokee Indians to present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s. Many of them died on the Trail of Tears. But until recently historians have largely ignored the tribal remnant that avoided removal and remained in North Carolina. John R. Finger shifts attention to the Eastern Band of Cherokees, descended from that remnant and now numbering almost ten thousand, most of whom live on a reservation adjacent to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Cherokee Americans is, ironically, the first comprehensive account of the twentieth-century experience of a band that is known to and photographed by millions of tourists.This book is a sequel to The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 18191900 (1984) by John R. Finger, who is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee.

The Cherokee Company was established "to organize the Quallatown people as a corporation" and to help W.H. Thomas who was buying lands in western North Carolina to be conveyed to the Cherokee Indians.--Cf. J.R. Finger. Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819-1900, pages 44-45

Discusses the history of the Cherokee Indians, including origins, contact with Europeans, and their struggle to survive into the twenty-first century.

Documents the 1830s policy shift of the U.S. government through which it discontinued efforts to assimilate Native Americans in favor of forcibly relocating them west of the Mississippi, in an account that traces the decision's specific effect on the Cherokee Nation, U.S.-Indian relations, and contemporary society.