IN APRIL 1847, AFTER the potato crop failed in the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland, John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, wrote a letter to the editor of the Cherokee Advocate: ‘It is said that there are not less than 300,000 Scotch on the Highlands and Islands, who must through charity, be fed during the ensuing summer or die of famine’, he said. He urged the Cherokee people to do something for this ‘benevolent and Christian cause’. ‘Have the Scotch no claim upon the Cherokees?’, Ross asked. ‘Have they not a very especial claim? They have.’ Ross called on the Cherokee people to hold a meeting at the capital, Tahlequah, to take steps to raise money. The meeting appointed a ‘Relief Committee’ and in May, Ross sent a bank draft for $190 ‘for the relief of those who are suffering by the famine in Scotland’. It was more than many Cherokees could afford. In 1847, the Cherokee Indians in what is now Oklahoma and Arkansas were just beginning to emerge from more than twenty years of crisis. They had become divided into bitter factions, been driven from their homelands in Georgia and endured civil war within their nation. And John Ross had never set foot in Scotland. So what explains the Cherokees’ generosity and empathy for people 4,000 miles away whose sufferings can have seemed no greater than their own?

Romantic assumptions that a natural affinity existed between Scots and American Indians as clan-based peoples do not suffice as an answer. Scottish General John Forbes, who had both Cherokees and Highland Scots in his army as he marched against the French Fort Duquesne (renamed Fort Pitt) in 1758, described them as cousins; but just a couple of years later, with Britain now at war against the Cherokees, Highland troops burned Cherokee villages, destroyed Cherokee crops and killed Cherokee people. The explanation for the Cherokees’ response to the Highland famine lies instead in the enduring presence of Scots and their descendants in the Indian nations of the south-eastern United States.