Before it was discovered, we were here.

The Cherokee Nation was a flourishing civilization long before the idea of America even existed. The old man knew their roots stretched back long before the 1500s, back to a time when good, future Americans were still suffering in European feuds. They were a people who had built a life on the land long before the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto made the fatal mistake of trying to conquer them. De Soto was gone, swallowed by history, and so were his descendants—but the Cherokee remained. They had flourished, holding councils and war parties, navigating the mountain trails of Appalachia and the Great Smoky Mountains.
Yet, a few hundred years later, their fate would be decided by a man driven by the humiliation of a tarnished wedding and a ruthless bloodthirstiness that rivaled Vlad the Impaler.
Sitting at his desk, sifting through the verified military muster rolls, the old man’s finger stopped on two names. He leaned back in his chair, staring at the pages.
“What’s this? He was here…”
Sam Houston was at this battle. And so was Sequoya.
If you’ve ever been to Texas, you’ve seen the giant statue of Sam Houston. He is a giant in Texas historical and political life. But the records the old man held didn’t show a giant; they showed a 21-year-old Third Lieutenant in the 39th U.S. Infantry, bleeding from a barbed Creek arrow in his groin and two musket balls in his shoulder, building Jackson’s military ladder with his own flesh. Reading a quote Houston later wrote about the sun going down on the Creek Nation, the old man realized that Houston carried the physical scars of that battle for the rest of his life, only to later break sharply with Jackson’s aggressive policies, stating that “indiscriminate slaughter achieves nothing but the degradation of the nation that inflicts it”.
But it was the second name that haunted the old man the most: George Gist. Sequoya.
“I can only imagine what Sequoya thought at these proceedings,” the old man whispered to the quiet room. “Did it affect him the way it affected me?”
Sequoya was there, serving as a private in the Regiment of Cherokee Volunteers. The old man thought about the dark, terrible irony of it all. It was Cherokee warriors like Sequoya who had swam the freezing Tallapoosa River to steal the Red Sticks’ canoes, cutting off their retreat and sealing Jackson’s victory. They had fought bravely on the “right” side.
How could a man of Sequoya’s brilliance not see what was about to happen? The old man wondered what went through Sequoya’s mind when the dust settled and the betrayal began. The friendly Creeks had fought on Jackson’s side too, and their reward was the Treaty of Fort Jackson, where Jackson stripped them of 23 million acres of land. The loyal Creeks were rendered homeless and landless; they ceased to be a nation on that land at that very moment.
Sequoya fought to secure Jackson’s victory years before he finished inventing the Cherokee alphabet. The old man felt a heavy sorrow recognizing that the very literacy Sequoya would create to preserve Cherokee sovereignty would later be used to write desperate petitions against Jackson’s removal policies—petitions that Jackson completely ignored.
The old man closed the muster rolls. The Cherokee had survived De Soto and the mountains, only to be betrayed by the very commander they had bled to save. The historical record was completely silent on what Sequoya h said that day, but the treaties proved exactly how his loyalty was repaid. The old man picked up his pen. The trial in his war room was moving forward, and he now had his star witnesses.