Cherokees in Dallas

The plaque's story has a longer ending. The Handbook of Texas places the Cherokee (Tsalagi) arrival in early 1820, when Chief Bowl, known as Duwali, led some sixty families to the Three Forks of the Trinity, the site of present Dallas. Pressure from prairie tribes pushed them east to farms in what is now Rusk County. President Mirabeau Lamar wanted them gone from Texas. In the summer of 1839 Duwali and more than a hundred others were killed at the battle of the Neches, and survivors were driven across the Red River.

What the plaque says

Cherokees in Dallas Ninety Cherokee Indians, led by Chief Bowles, immigrated to this area from Arkansas Territory in 1819, but were driven out 2 years later by hostile Indians who resented the intrusion. Remnants of group signed Treaty of Sept. 29, 1843, agreeing to respect the Republic of Texas and its settlers. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — steps away
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 1.2 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 1.2 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 1.5 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Browder Springs — steps away
• City of Dallas — 0.5 mi
• Crockett, John McClannahan — 0.7 mi
• Nicholas Henry Darnell — 0.7 mi