Historical Background

The insatiable desire of white settlers for lands inevitably led to the formulation of general policy of removing the Native Americans. Political leaders including Jefferson believed that the Indians should be civilized, which to him meant converting them to Christianity and turning them into farmers. National policy to move Indians west of the Mississippi developed after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Eager for land to raise cotton, the white settlers moving into these lands pressed the U.S. government to remove the Native Americans from their homelands.

Federal Indian Removal Policy

In 1825 the U.S. government formally adopted a removal policy, which was carried out in the 1830s by President Andrew Jackson, from Tennessee, who was a forceful proponent of Indian removal.

In 1830, just a year after taking office, President Jackson began to aggressively implement a broad policy of extinguishing Indian land titles and relocating the Indian population. The Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which said that "no state could achieve proper culture, civilization, and progress, as long as Indians remained within its boundaries". This act gave the president power to negotiate removal treaties with Indian tribes living east of Mississippi. Under these treaties, the Indians were to give up their lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for the lands to the west.

Although many Americans saw this as an excuse for a brutal and inhumane course of action, and protested against the act, they did not manage to save the southeastern tribes from removal.

Jackson’s attitude toward Native Americans was patronizing. He described them as children in need of guidance, and believed that the removal policy was beneficial to the Indians. According to his view removal would save Indian people from harassments of whites and would resettle them in the area where they could govern themselves in peace.

The result was particularly overwhelming for the Indians of the southeastern United States, primarily for the so-called Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. By the late 1830s, the Five Civilized Tribes signed more than 40 treaties exchanging their eastern lands for the lands in the west. The tribes agreed to the treaties for strategic reasons. They wanted to appease the government in the hopes of retaining some of their land, and they wanted to protect themselves from white harassment. As a result of the treaties, the United States gained control over three-quarters of Alabama and Florida, as well as parts of Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky and North Carolina.

Perhaps the most devastating episode of the relocation of the Native Americans is that concerning the removal of the Cherokee, who called themselves The Principal people or Ani Yun wiya. They were the ones who put up the greatest resistance and they were the last ones to go.

Since first contact with European explorers in the 1500s, the Cherokee Nation has been recognized as one of the most progressive among Native American tribes. Before contact Cherokee culture had developed for almost 1000 years in the south-eastern United States- the lower Appalachians of the present day states of Georgia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and parts of Kentucky, and Alabama. Here they developed a culture based on farming, hunting and fishing.

Life of the traditional Cherokee remained unchanged as late as 1710, which marked the beginning of Cherokee trade with the whites. The period of frontier contact from 1540-1786, brought the white expansion, and the cession of Cherokee lands to the colonies in exchange for trade goods.

The Cherokee began to adopt some European customs; they intermarried with the European settlers and gradually turned to agricultural economy. However, between 1721 and 1819, they were being even more pressured to give up their traditional homelands, and over 90 percent of their lands were ceded.

By 1820s the Cherokee were not a nomadic tribe, but had become farmers and cattle ranchers. They built European-style houses, roads, schools, and churches. A Cherokee alphabet, the Talking Leaves, made by Sequoyah, brought literacy and soon they established a newspaper and shaped a formal governing system . Many had accepted Christianity, and they had translated the Bible into Cherokee language.

The Cherokee used legal means in their attempt to protect their territory and safeguard their rights. They sought protection from white settlers who usually harassed them by stealing their livestock and burning their towns. In 1827 the Cherokee adopted a written constitution declaring themselves to be a sovereign nation. The state of Georgia, however, did not recognize this status, but saw them as tenants living on state land. The Cherokee took their case to the Supreme Court. In Cherokee vs. Georgia the Supreme Court ruled against the Cherokee.

When gold was found on Cherokee lands in 1829, efforts to dislodge The Principal People from their lands were intensified. Besieged with gold fever and with a thirst for expansion, the white communities and the U. S. government decided it was time for the Cherokee to leave behind their farms, their land and their home.

The Cherokee attempted to fight removal legally by going to the Supreme Court again in 1831 and this time the court ruled in favor of the Cherokee. In the case of Worcester vs. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was sovereign, making the removal laws invalid. However, the state of Georgia refused to abide by the Court decision, and President Jackson refused to enforce the law.

The Treaty of New Echota

By 1835 the Cherokee were divided. Most of them opposed the removal and supported Principal Chief John Ross, a mixed blood of Scottish and one eight Cherokee descent.

However, a minority believed that they might survive as people only if they signed treaty with the U.S. government. In 1835, this minority signed a removal agreement - Treaty of New Echota, which ceded all Cherokee territory east of the Mississippi River to the federal government in exchange for 5 million dollars and new homelands in Indian Territory. Only 300 to 500 Cherokee were there, and none were elected representatives of the Cherokee Nation. The treaty signed by Major John Ridge and twenty members of the Treaty Party, gave Jackson the legal document to remove the first Cherokee. More then 15 000 Cherokee protested the illegal treaty. Yet, the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in 1836, and the fate of the Cherokee was sealed. When the pro-removal Cherokee signed that treaty, they also signed their own death warrants. In 1828 the Cherokee National Council passed a law, originally drafted by Ridge himself that called for the death penalty for anybody who agreed to sell or dispose of tribal lands.

Most of the Cherokee, including Chief John Ross, did not believe that they would be forced to move. In May 1838, 7000 federal army troops under the command of General Winfield Scott began arresting the Cherokee and moving them in stockades until they could be removed west. Altogether there were 31 forts constructed for this purpose.

In spite of orders to troops to treat the tribe members kindly, the roundup was very cruel. Men, women and children were taken away from their homes, families were separated, the elderly and ill forced out at gunpoint, and people were given only few moments to collect their belongings, and then they were herded into forts with minimal facilities and food.

One member of the guard would later write:

"I saw the helpless Cherokees [sic] arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle and sheep into 645 wagons and started toward the west."

It is difficult to imagine the hardships, which the people of the Cherokee nation who made the forced march to the Indian Territory had to face.

Most of them hoped that the government would not force them to leave and made no plans for the long journey. When the government roundup of Cherokee began, many were forced from their homes with only the barest possessions. 16 000 Cherokee were divided into 16 detachments of about 1000 each.

Three groups left in June of 1838 travelling by rail, boat, and wagon primarily on the Water Route. But the detachments found themselves making the journey in the hottest part of the year when the river levels were too low for navigation.

Under the generally indifferent army commanders, human losses for these first groups of Cherokee removed were extremely high. Sickness and death rates caused by drought, bad water, bad diet and physical exhaustion were especially high among children. Some of the Cherokee left almost naked and without shoes or only in moccasins and refused government clothing because they felt it would be taken as an acceptance of being removed from their homes. Some refused government food; others were given food that they were not normally part of their diet, such as wheat flour, which they did not know how to use. One military estimate of the death in one of the parties was put at 17,7 %, with half of the dead being children.

15 000 captives still awaited removal. Poor sanitation and drought made them miserable. Many of them died. Chief Ross and The National Council of Cherokee appealed to General Scott to permit the rest of the Cherokee to wait until fall to move, and to supervise their own removal. General Scott approved the plan and Ross administrated the effort. The Cherokee were moved from removal forts to interment camps until travel resumed.

Although the last parties under Ross left in early fall and arrived in Oklahoma during the brutal winter of 1838-39, he significantly reduced the loss of life among his people. Twelve detachments of the Principal People which left in November, travelled to Indian Territory overland on existing roads across Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri. One detachment was lead by the Rev. Jesse Bushyhead and his Cherokee wife. He had been brought up within the culture of the Indians, and became a leader among Cherokee in their struggle against the white man’s intrusion.

These detachments also met many hardships on their 1200 miles long journey to the west. Heavy rains turned the primitive roads to mud, and the Cherokee were often forced to manually drag the wagons out of the mud. Supplies of food were of poor quality. Road conditions, illness, and the distress of winter, made death a daily occurrence.

Two thirds of the ill-equipped Cherokee that were trapped beside the frozen Mississippi River still remembered a half-century later the hundreds of sick and dying in wagons or lying on the frozen ground with only a single blanket provided by the government to each Indian for shelter from the cold wind. Falling temperatures caused the surface of the river to freeze before all the detachments could be ferried across. The ice prevented both boat and horses from moving. Besides the cold, there was starvation and malnutrition. Weakened by the hunger, the Cherokee became easy victims of disease, particularly cholera, smallpox and dysentery. Many died on both sides of the river waiting for journey to resume. Quatie Ross, the Chief Ross’ wife, gave her only blanket to a child and died of pneumonia.

A traveller who witnessed a passing mother holding her dying child wrote:

"She could only carry her dying child in her arms a few miles farther, and then, she must stop in a stranger-land and consign her much loved babe to the cold ground, and in that without pomp or ceremony, and pass on with the multitude."

Another survivor of the march remembered:

"Long time we travel on way to new land. People feel bad when they leave old nation. Women cry and make sad wails. Children cry and make men cry, and all look sad like when friends die, but they say nothing and just put heads down and keep go towards West. Many days pass and people die very much. We bury close by Trail."

In March 1839, all survivors had arrived to the Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma, a word that means red people. It was estimated that of 16 000 who started the dreary march westward, more than 4000 Cherokee (nearly a fifth of the Cherokee population) died as a result of the removal. The route they made and the journey itself, which lasted nearly a year, became known as the Trail of Tears. And so a country formed fifty years earlier on the premise "…that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…" brutally closed the curtain on a culture that had done no wrong.

In the Indian territory the Cherokee tried to adapt to their new homeland, and they re-established their own system of government, which was modelled on that of the United States. In 1839, John Ross was elected Principal Chief of the reconstituted Cherokee Nation. Tahlequah, OK was its capital. It remains headquarters for the Cherokee Nation today.

About 1000 Cherokee in Tennessee and North Carolina escaped the roundup. They gained recognition in 1866, establishing their tribal government in 1868 in Cherokee, North Carolina. They are known as the East Band of the Cherokee Indians. Today, the Cherokee are the second largest Indian nation in the United States.

The Legend of the Cherokee Rose

No better symbol exists of the pain and suffering on the Trail of Tear (The Trail Where They Cried) than the Cherokee Rose. The mothers of the Cherokee grieved and cried so much that the chiefs prayed for a sign that would lift the mothers’ spirits and give them strength to care for their children. From that day forward a beautiful rose grew wherever a mother’s tear fell to the ground.

The rose is white, for the mothers’ tears; it has a gold center, for the gold taken from the Cherokee lands and seven leaves on each stem that represent the seven Cherokee clans that made the journey (Bird, Paint, Deer, Blue, wolf, Long hair, Wild Potato). To this day the Cherokee rose grows along the route of the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee Rose became also the official flower of the State of Georgia.

Retracing the Trail of Tears

In December 1987, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating the Trail of Tears a National Historic Trail and an advisory council to oversee the marking of its routes was established. The National Park Service’s master plan called for hiking trails and a marked route from Tennessee to Oklahoma that would include interpretive centers and historical markers. However, after almost 15 years there are few highway markers and even fewer places for people to stop and learn about Cherokee and the Trail. The interpretive centers are nonexistent and the hiking trails have yet to be plotted, although several states have museums dedicated to the Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears has also been difficult to trace, because it consisted of four routes, including one by river, that were used just once, and today some of those trails are under asphalt and some are on the private lands

Trail of Tears State Park - Cape Girardeau, Missouri

Located along the Mississippi River in Cape Girardeau County, the park commemorates the infamous episode in American history, called The Trail of Tears.

The park preserves the native woodlands much as they would have appeared to the Cherokee who camped there after crossing the Mississippi, and a memorial monument dedicated to: " Princess Otahki, daughter of Chief Jesse Bushyhead – one of the hundred Cherokee Indians who died there in the severe winter of 1838-39". It is a tribute to all the Cherokee who suffered and died on the sad journey. Princess Otahki, i.e. Nancy Bushyhead Hildebrand, was the sister of Rev. Jesse Bushyhead, who led one of the detachments of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Park, Hopkinsville, Kentucky