Chieftains Museum, also known as the Major Ridge Home, is a two-story white frame house built around a log house of 1792 in Cherokee country (today it is within present-day Rome, Georgia). It was the home of the Cherokee leader Major Ridge— notable for his role in negotiating and signing the Treaty of New Echota of 1835, which ceded the remainder of Cherokee lands in the Southeast to the United States. He was part of a minority group known as the Treaty Party, who believed that relocation was inevitable and wanted to negotiate the best deal with the United States for their people. The chiefs had agreed they could not go to war against the United States on the removal issue, but most other Cherokee opposed Ridge and the Treaty Party. He and some other members of the Treaty Party were assass