What happened to those who resisted removal during the Trail of Tears?

Answer 1

At least a few who escaped, which included William Agee born in 1820 in Tennessee made their way to Spring Hollow, Missouri near Lebanon. They stay they for a long time but many had moved to Springfield, Missouri by 1900. A few formed an extended family (Agee) of a Cherokee village that could not be distinguished from the while community around it. Cleroa Agee was warned by her grandfather (William Agee who escaped the trail) that he escaped prison and never to tell anyone she was Indian or she and her family could be deported to Oklahoma. She could was afraid to pass her language to her children. She never cut her hair, which was the custom for Cherokee women and she was skilled in fining medicine in a field of weeds. She was my grandmother.

Answer 2

Approximately 1000 Cherokees were able to avoid being rounded up and marched to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears in 1838. Those who escaped, it is said, mostly fled to the mountains and lived quietly in the forests and with distant relatives, trying to avoid notice. Before 1838 there was a group of several hundred Cherokees who left the tribal lands and lived as citizens of the United States in the Okonoluftee area. These Cherokees were not rounded up, and it is believed that many of the escaped Cherokees made their way to Okonoluftee, where they could get some meager assistance.

It's important to remember that, prior to the Trail of Tears, the Cherokees, unlike most other native American tribes, were almost assimilated into the European lifestyle. Many became Christians. They learned English, they took European names, they restructured their tribal government to resemble English representational government, and they made treaties and contracts in the style of the American/European courts. They dressed like European Americans, and they lived similarly to the settlers, with many white men and women marrying Cherokees. Sometimes these mixed couples lived in Cherokee villages, and sometimes they lived in colonial towns. They referred to themselves on census records and other legal documents as "white". For this reason, it was probably much easier for the Cherokees who managed to avoid the forced relocation to just blend into the communities where they were--although they were largely ignored and neglected in poverty.

About 20-30 years later, after the Cherokees had won Court battles to receive reparations from the American government, these Eastern Cherokees started to emerge and regroup, eventually founding the Eastern Nation of Cherokees in North Carolina on lands restored to them by the U.S. government.