共用题干 第二篇

The Cherokee Nation

Long before the white man came to America,the land belonged to the American Indian
nations.The nation of the Cherokees lived in what is now the southeastern part of the
United States.
After the white man came,the Cherokees copied many of their ways.One Cherokee
named Sequoyah saw how important reading and writing were to the white man.He decided
to invent a way to write down the spoken Cherokee language.He began by making word
pictures.For each word he drew a picture.But that proved impossible一there were just too
many words.Then he took the 85 sounds that made up the language.Using his own
imagination and an English spelling book, Sequoyah invented a sign for each sound.His
alphabet proved amazingly easy to learn.Before long,many Cherokees knew how to read
and write in their own language.By 1828,they were even printing their own newspaper.
In 1830,the U.S. Congress passed a law.It allowed the government to remove
Indians from their lands.The Cherokees refused to go.They had lived on their lands for
centuries.It belonged to them.Why should they go to a strange land far beyond the
Mississippi River?
The army was sent to drive the Cherokees out.Soldiers surrounded their villages and
marched them at gunpoint（在枪口的威胁下）into the western territory. The sick, the old
and the small children went in carts,along with their belongings.The rest of the people
marched on foot or rode on horseback.It was November,yet many of them still wore their
summer clothes.Cold and hungry,the Cherokees were quickly exhausted by the
hardships of the journey.Many dropped dead and were buried by the roadside.When the
last group arrived in their new home in March 1839,more than 4,000 had died.It was
indeed a march of death. A law was passed in 1 830 to