Lovely's Purchase
Lovely's Purchase (also Lovely's Donation), was part of the early nineteenth century Missouri and Arkansaw territories. It was created in 1817, to give a haven to the Cherokee and other Native Americans who were being forced to leave the southeastern United States and moving west to Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) through territory then inhabited by sometimes hostile White settlers and several other Indian tribes, especially members of the Osage Indian Nation. Following years of political maneuvering and sometimes conflicting treaties, the Purchase was finally split between the Cherokee and White settlers, with the larger section going solely to the Cherokee Nation. Background President James Monroe had promised an exclusive "gateway to the setting sun"—an area devoted to settlement for the members of the Cherokee Nation where they were not "...surrounded by the White man." Starting in 1809, members of the Cherokee Nation living west of the Appalachians in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas, had started migrating west to the lands set aside by the United States government for those tribal members willing to exchange their eastern property for homesteads in the recently set-aside Indian Territory. A route was planned by the U.S. federal government with the purpose to insulate