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I did point out earlier that the Cherokee made a lot of wars and dominated surrounding tribes. This wasn't to denigrate--just to put some reality in all the romance. It wasn't the biggest tribe around by accident--it absorbed many other tribes. Andrew Jackson betrayed them cruelly--but they were not without cruelty themselves.

No human being is.

...No human being is

Yes. AI's made/make good soldiers for many reasons, savagery in battle is one.

That the Cherokee survive in numbers today is in good part due to strength. I have never been one to abide the 'romantic eye' on AI's.

It wasn't the biggest tribe around by accident--it absorbed many other tribes. Andrew Jackson betrayed them cruelly--but they were not without cruelty themselves.

That may be true, and it's a good point to remember. But you are still making what is essentially an argument ad hominem against the Cherokee declaration, rather than accept its face argument, that the Cherokee had suffered mightily at the hands of the U.S. Government. They had also had bloody differences with white settlers even in colonial times, per the comment above about the Cherokee's and other tribes' cooperation with the British, which kept the white settlers in the three prerevolutionary counties of Tennessee forted-up and unable to expand for ten long years, and their population stagnant thanks to disease and malnutrition. That will have been a bitter memory on the other side.

Bottom line, the Cherokee had had concrete experience with the operational policies of the Government and the kind of people who drove them that illuminated their own best interest and guided their choice of allegiance in 1861.

Or is that not a fair statement?