When
people from this part of the country wished to go to Ohio, Indiana, or
the Mississippi Valley, they would take the old north-and-south trail to
Ross's Landing, follow the Tennessee River to where it empties into the
Ohio, near Paducah, Kentucky, and proceed thence to Mississippi.
In the thirties, Atlanta--or rather the site of Atlanta, for the city
was not founded until 1840--was on the border of white civilization in
northern Georgia, all the country to the north of the Chattahoochee
River, which flows a few miles distant from the city, having belonged to
the Cherokee Indians, who had been moved there from Florida. Even in
those times the Cherokees were civilized, as Indians go, for they lived
in huts and practised agriculture. Of course, however, their
civilization was not comparable with that of the white man. If they had
been as civilized as he, they might have driven him out of Florida,
instead of having been themselves driven out, and they might have driven
him out of Georgia, too, instead of having been pushed on, as they were,
to the Indian Territory--eighteen thousand of them, under military
supervision, on boats from Ross's Landing--leaving the beautiful white
Cherokee rose, which grows wild and in great profusion, in the spring,
as almost their sole memorial on Georgia soil.
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