her
History
Children's author, Cordellya Smith, MAE ’15, shares with us how family heritage influenced her writing. The following feature is her account.
M
y story begins back when the first immigrants who came to the U.S. were from Ireland and Scotland. They came to leave hardships at home and became founders of the American Dream. During the American Revolution, they volunteered to fight with the hope of creating a new country free from British rule. When the war ended, the new United States of America gave some of these soldiers war bounty land grants as payment for their service on “unclaimed” land in the Appalachian Mountains. Other soldiers used their military pensions to buy large tracts of the “unclaimed” land. This resulted in a migration of Irish and Scottish settlers into the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky after the Revolutionary War. I can imagine when those soldier settlers arrived at their new properties and discovered the land was not actually “unclaimed.” The Cherokee were already living there. As a result, they began living, sometimes more peacefully than others, beside Cherokee neighbors. When their children and grandchildren grew up, many of them elected to take Cherokee husbands or wives from neighboring families. Margaret Verble, a Cherokee author who lives in Kentucky, once said, “I think in general the Cherokees adopted a strategy early on of marrying into white people on the theory that whites would be less likely to kill their own children in the future.”
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SPRING 2021
