Memories run deep in western North Carolina, passing from grandfather to grandson.

In recent years, some of these memories have helped archaeologists bring evidence of what happened in those areas in the late 1830s — when Cherokees were taken from their homes and launched on the Trail of Tears — to the surface.

Dr. Brett Riggs, of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina, discussed researchers’ work to document these military sites during the State of Sequoyah Conference, sponsored by the Cherokee Nation and held last weekned at Northeastern State University.

Riggs investigated the sites used by the military as their headquarters during the roundup the Cherokees; the roads on which Cherokees were transported to internment camps where they waited, in primitive and deprived conditions, awaiting the journey west; and way stations along these roads, where settlers attended officers, troops, and where Cherokees camped briefly overnight.

Unlike Fort Gibson, established a decade earlier as a western outpost in Indian Territory, these forts were transitory. They were abandoned when the last Cherokees had left and they had served their purpose. As a consequence, little physical evidence of them remains today.

The southwest, or Aquohee, area of North Carolina was the seat of those traditional Cherokees most opposed to removal, Riggs said.

He described the actions taken during that era as “the loss of American innocence to the first manifestations of manifest destiny,” referring to the theory the United States used to take over native lands ranging westward to the Pacific.

“With these deaths [along the Trail of Tears], the Cherokee Nation lost much of its ancestral memory and hope of its future destiny,” Riggs said.

His research coincided with the extension of the national historic Trail of Tears eastward from the points in Tennessee where the trail headed west.

“Everybody realized the actual trail traces from the home of every Cherokee citizen, every place where Cherokees were taken,” he said. “Now the trail is officially recognized from all homes where Cherokees were taken.”

Then, as now, the mountains of western North Carolina were sparsely populated. Cherokee families lived on small farms or hamlets. In 1835, these were the Cherokees least influenced by Western ideas of civilization, Riggs said, although most had adopted some European ways of life.

Much information can be gleaned from the claims submitted by individuals for reimbursement of taken lands, telling what the people owned and had to leave behind.

“They document incredible details of the daily lives of Cherokee families,” he said.

The forts he studied were established in 1837 and 1838.