In 1838, the United States government deported more than 16,000 Cherokee Indian people from their homelands in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, under the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and thousands perished on the forced relocation known as the Trail of Tears. When the army began removing Cherokee citizens from North Carolina on June 12, 1838, most submitted peacefully, but hundreds avoided capture and remained behind. Some families with white members were exempt because they held dual citizenship in North Carolina and the Cherokee Nation, others received emigration waivers from federal enrolling agent Preston Starrett, and many hid in the Snowbird and Hanging Dog mountains. Along the Valley River, Junaluska, Wachacha, John Welch, Gideon Morris, Nancy Hawkins, and other exempted Cherokees concealed, fed, and supplied fugitives, though many in hiding suffered starvation and disease and many children died. Survivors emerged in the fall of 1838 to find their land overrun by white settlers, then gathered on the lands of John Welch and Gideon Morris on Valley River, where by 1840 they were forming settlements, building townhouses, and maintaining councils, dances, ballplays, and other traditional practices. Many descendants of these families now live in the modern Cherokee communities of Tomotla, Hanging Dog, and Grape Creek in Cherokee County, reflecting the survival, persistence, and resurgence of Cherokee communities in their pre-Removal homeland.