Memories run deep in western North Carolina, passing from grandfather to grandson.

In recent years, some of these memories have helped archaeologists bring evidence of what happened in those areas in the late 1830s — when Cherokees were taken from their homes and launched on the Trail of Tears — to the surface.

Dr. Brett Riggs, of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina, discussed researchers’ work to document these military sites during the State of Sequoyah Conference, sponsored by the Cherokee Nation and held last weekned at Northeastern State University.

Riggs investigated the sites used by the military as their headquarters during the roundup the Cherokees; the roads on which Cherokees were transported to internment camps where they waited, in primitive and deprived conditions, awaiting the journey west; and way stations along these roads, where settlers attended officers, troops, and where Cherokees camped briefly overnight.

Unlike Fort Gibson, established a decade earlier as a western outpost in Indian Territory, these forts were transitory. They were abandoned when the last Cherokees had left and they had served their purpose. As a consequence, little physical evidence of them remains today.

The southwest, or Aquohee, area of North Carolina was the seat of those traditional Cherokees most opposed to removal, Riggs said.

He described the actions taken during that era as “the loss of American innocence to the first manifestations of manifest destiny,” referring to the theory the United States used to take over native lands ranging westward to the Pacific.

“With these deaths [along the Trail of Tears], the Cherokee Nation lost much of its ancestral memory and hope of its future destiny,” Riggs said.

His research coincided with the extension of the national historic Trail of Tears eastward from the points in Tennessee where the trail headed west.

“Everybody realized the actual trail traces from the home of every Cherokee citizen, every place where Cherokees were taken,” he said. “Now the trail is officially recognized from all homes where Cherokees were taken.”

Then, as now, the mountains of western North Carolina were sparsely populated. Cherokee families lived on small farms or hamlets. In 1835, these were the Cherokees least influenced by Western ideas of civilization, Riggs said, although most had adopted some European ways of life.

Much information can be gleaned from the claims submitted by individuals for reimbursement of taken lands, telling what the people owned and had to leave behind.

“They document incredible details of the daily lives of Cherokee families,” he said.

The forts he studied were established in 1837 and 1838.

“Unlike permanent garrisons there are very few federal records related to these forts,” Riggs said.

However, documentation exists to pinpoint their locations.

He showed photos of the locations of a couple of forts, now in residential neighborhoods. Others lie under modern manmade lakes. Riggs called Fort Lindsay, at the northeast corner of the group of forts, “the stopper in the bottle” to keep Cherokees from escaping the area and avoiding removal to Indian Territory.

“You can see very little evidence left of these forts in North Carolina,” Riggs said.

There are monuments at a couple of the sites.

Unlike the forts, there are traces of the roads — some as modern country roads, others remaining as rough trails. Riggs said one can walk along these trails and wonder what happened. After all, statistics show someone died every quarter of a mile.

He called one section of trail through the woods one of the spookiest places he’s ever been, and can only speculate at what occurred there more than 170 years ago.

The Unicoy Turnpike, the road along which people were taken to internment camps, went from western North Carolina into Tennessee. About 20 miles have been found of the route. Other routes included the Great State Road and the Army Road.

The Great State Road was built by a Cherokee construction crew in 1837.

“Here they were, working for the people who would dispossess them of their country and working on the very road they would be taken out on,” Riggs said.

He told of being guided along the Army Road, which followed an ancient trail, by an 80-year-old man who had, as it happened, killed a bear nearby that morning.

The man told him of an incident that happened on the road during the Civil War.

“It’s those old Hoopers, they were mean as snakes,” the man told Riggs.

“He was talking about them like it was yesterday. I asked him, ‘How do you know the road?’ He said, ‘My granddad showed it to me,’” Riggs said.

The man’s grandfather had been born in 1835, and had used the road when it was new.

Riggs also found the site of the Aquohee District Courthouse, where the document that later became known as the Treaty of New Echota was proposed.

No action was taken there because area residents, opposed to the removal, refused to show up to discuss it.

He had despaired of finding it, but did so, along with the site of the Valleytowns Baptist Mission and School, which functioned between 1828 and 1836 – a meeting place for leaders of the National Party, a resistance group.

“Somebody called and said, ‘We plowed up our garden and there’s a bunch of old blue china out there. Why don’t you come in and look at it?’” Riggs said.

It turned out to be the mission site. Besides china, it contained pieces of old slate used for writing boards. Riggs hoped to find marks of old writing in Cherokee syllabary, but that desire proved fruitless.

Another fortuitous encounter took place at the site of Fort Armistead in Tennessee. Unlike the fort sites in North Carolina, this one is relatively intact.

Riggs showed a photo of Ken Dalton, owner of the site, who helped with the research.

“On my land is a stockade where they kept the Indians,” Dalton told Riggs.

Dalton said a 90-year-old man had showed it to him 40 years previously.

“He said his granddaddy was stationed here and everybody around here knew it was a fort,” Riggs said.

A large hole in the center of the property bears witness to the fort’s location. The fort was along the Unicoy Turnpike and was likely a stop on the road to the stockades where the prisoners were warehoused before their journey west.

Riggs also told of digs at individual Cherokee cabins. Many of their owners bore names familiar in this area, such as Christie, Hogshooter, and Welch. Riggs said the excavations will continue next year at the various sites.