Again the pent-up and out-driven Indian tribes making, as it were, a dying effort to save themselves, rose into rebellion, and the story again is very sad. The Chickasaws and the Choctaws had, during the last few years, quietly emigrated west of the Mississippi, into the territory bordering on Arkansas, which had been allotted to them instead of their own lands, and as an inducement to remove voluntarily, the United States had paid the expenses of their journey, and supplied them with a year’s provisions. Other tribes there were, however, who were not so easily managed, and it is of their struggles to maintain a footing on their own lands that we have now to speak. The Cherokees were the most civilised of the Indian tribes; they had an established government, a national legislature, and written laws. Their rights had been protected during the administration of John Quincy Adams, against the claims of Georgia. Under the administration, however, of the unscrupulous and aggressive General Jackson, the legislature of Georgia, which acted very much in the spirit of the president, extended its laws over the Indian territory comprised within their boundaries, and among other severe enactments it was declared, that “no Indian nor the descendants of an Indian, residing within the Creek or Cherokee nation of Indians, should be deemed a competent witness or party to any suit, in any court where a white man is a defendant.” It was in vain that the Supreme Court of the United States protested against these acts as unconstitutional. Georgia persisted in its hard enactments, and President Jackson informed the alarmed and anxious Cherokees that “he had no power to oppose the sovereignty of any state over all who may be within its limits.” Their case was precisely as if a fly, caught in a spider’s web, had appealed for deliverance to another spider, when the advice would have been that of President Jackson to the Cherokees—“they must abide the issue, without any hope that he would interfere.” They did abide the issue, until, worn out by oppressions and vexations, some of their chiefs were induced to sign a treaty of evacuation. In vain the Cherokees as a nation protested against it; lived quietly and inoffensively; availed themselves of the civilisation of the whites, and wished to profit by it; they were still the red men, the aborigines of the forest, and they must become once more dwellers in the wilderness. There was no help for them. Their general emigration was decided upon in 1835, but it was not effected until three years later.