The differences are heavily overstated, primarily as a means of dismissing native people as "primitive" and necessarily subservient to the arriving colonists. The main difference with the Cherokee was simply geographic. They lived in land not heavily settled until later in the colonization process and had more time to acclimate to western legal norms. It didn't save them, but it gave them these neat little anecdotes that we can pretend made them "some of the good ones".