AN INDIAN REPUBLIC.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 350, 22 January 1903, Page 6

AN INDIAN REPUBLIC.

Country nf the Cherokee* In the Mountain* of Western Worth Oarolina. In Woman's Home Companion Mr. Landon Knight gives the following interesting account of a unique republic in North Carolina: Every one. of course, knows of the little republics of Europe, but very few realize that in the United States there is a country that is larger, wealthier and more populous than San Marino, (iaust and Monico combined. Those dominions are not, nor indeed is the United States, more thoroughly rebublican than this little country jaes'iAing among the mountains of western North Carolina. There are legends and traditions which may indicate that ages beyond the ken of the historian's vision, and when the ancestors of the princes and potentates of the world of to-day were dwelling in caves like wild beasts and were subsisting on shell-fish amd acorns, these people were the lords of an ancient civilization. But, however that may be. it is certain that these people—the Cherokee Indian*—were, *vhen first discovered by the -white man. the most civilized of any of the aborigines on the North American continent, with the exception of the Aztecs and 'foltecs of Mexico. Oglethorpe ffnd his colonists found them inhabiting a magnificently beautiful ai:d fertile section of the country, embracing what is now northern Georgia, southern Tennessee and western North Carolina. They received him oa a brother, and bade him take as much of their lands as he and his people might need. Writing of them to Wesley, he said: "It is strange how used they arc in the ways of kindness and •ivility; but most do I marvel at their government, which of a truth is not unlike our own in some particulars." With truth he might have gone further and said that in many things there were points of superiority in their favor over the British government of that day. For with them the Kiea of a kingship and a nobility witi their attendant privileges had never found a lodgment, but their theory of government was democratic, differing only in form from other democracies, and in fact relying for its strength and stability upon the consent of the governed."