Cherokee is an unincorporated community and census-designated place[4] in Butte County, California.

It is an area inhabited by Maidu Indians prior to the gold rush, but that takes its name from a band of Cherokee prospectors who perfected a mining claim on the site.

Possibly the site of the historic gold mine, on the 1994 Cherokee, California 7.5-minute quadrangle, a feature named "Cherokee Placer Mine" exists about 0.65 miles southwest of the above coordinates.

USGS identifies Cherokee Flat and Drytown as historic variant names for the community.

Around 1818 Spanish explorers found gold on Cherokee's south side near Table Mountain.

The town prospered during the mining period, and Butte County's first homes with running water were built in Cherokee.

In 1880 President Rutherford B. Hayes, his wife Lucy, Civil War General William T. Sherman and General John Bidwell came to visit Cherokee's famous hydraulic gold mine.

In the vicinity are Sugarloaf, a nearby promontory which is home to deer, foxes, doves, peacocks and hiking trails.

A Chinese Taoist temple, one of America's oldest Taoist establishments (no longer in use), built in the 1860s by the town's small Chinese community, was made a state historic site.