When the European explorers first arrived in the Appalachian Mountains they found a tribe of indians who were called Cherokees. The Cherokee had an organized society, lived in towns, built houses, and had town councils like most civilizations have.

Although the Cherokee Indians once inhabited all or part of the Appalachian Region of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia, they considered their land in and around what is now the Great Smokey Mountains, the heart of the Cherokee Nation. The settlement in the center of this nation was called Kituhwa and was located next to present day Bryson City.

There were occasional encounters with white explorers as early as 1540, but it wasn't until the 1700's when permanant trading posts were established that extensive contact was made between the two peoples. As more and more white settlers moved in on either side of the Cherokee, the pressure of being driven from their land increased until 1819 when they lost their land in the Smokies and moved their capital to Georgia.

The Cherokee made a lot of achievments and cultural changes during the 1800's in an effort to become accepted. They established a government with a written constitution, open schools, dressed like the white man, lived on farms, developed a written language and published a national newspaper that was printed in both Cherokee and English. All these attempts to acclimate were for naught when gold was discovered on the Cherokee's Georgia land near Dahlonega. The state of Georgia confiscated and annexed these Cherokee lands and took their personal legal rights away. Just a few years later, in 1835, the Federal government in a sham treaty took all the Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi River away from them. Even though they protested, 16,000 of their 17,000 were forced to walk to Oklahoma in what the Federal Government called the Removal but the Cherokee called The Trail of Tears because one-forth of the total who started either starved or froze to death along the way. The remaining thousand Cherokee hid out in the mountains and coves of the Smokies. Later, a white man who was part Cherokee began buying up land around the present day town of Cherokee, and it was this land that would make up the Qualla Boundary Reservation that is now the home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.

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