The experience of the Cherokee Indians in the 1820s and 1830s demonstrated that assimilation and civilization were no guarantees against white encroachment or forced removal from their lands. In the late eighteenth century the Cherokees, one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, relocated to seventy-two hundred square miles of land primarily in northwestern Georgia. The land was guaranteed them by federal treaties. By the 1820s the Cherokees had given up an existence based on seminomadic hunting and gathering, and had settled into a pattern of European American-style agriculture. The fifteen thousand Cherokees occupying the area had come to think of themselves as an independent nation. In 1827 they ratified a republican constitution with an elected representative government, a bicameral legislature, a court system, and a governmental bureaucracy. One of them, Sequoyah, created an eighty-six-lettcr phonetic alphabet, which they used to translate the Bible and...