West of Maggie Valley, the Blue Ridge Parkway and US-19 join up 40 miles west of Asheville at touristy Cherokee (pop. 5,971), commercial center of the 56,000-acre Cherokee Indian Reservation, which was established here by a small band of Cherokee Indians in 1866, long after the rest of this once-mighty tribe had been forcibly exiled to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. Cherokee is a last gasp of commercialism at the edge of the national park, a traffic-clogged gauntlet of places where you can See Live Bears, Eat Boiled Peanuts, Pan For Gold, or ride the “Rudicoaster” at the kid-friendly Santa’s Land amusement park. The biggest draw hereabouts is the ever-expanding Harrah’s Casino.
The upscale casino, the region’s biggest draw, looms over a fading roadside lined by tacky old-time souvenir stands like the “Big Chief,” but amidst the tourist-taunting sprawl is at least one worthwhile stop: the Museum of the Cherokee Indian (daily; $9), which traces tribal history from pre-conquest achievements—the Cherokee used a natural version of aspirin centuries before western chemists “discovered” it, for example—to their forced removal after gold was discovered here in the 1830s.
