McKinney

The Cherokee and the Trail of Tears

by Ryan McKinney
AMH 2010-03T

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As the United States of America continued to expand its territories in the early nineteenth
century, a tragic action was taken by the United States government to relocate several Native
American tribes to lands which they deemed to be suitable and out of the way. While at the time
the government felt justified in its actions, this event would later come to be known as an act of
genocide due to the events that transpired and the number of lives lost along the trail of this
massive relocation project. Because of the conditions and the outcome of this forced relocation,
the route which the Native Americans were forced to march has become known as the "Trail of
Tears" as a rough translation of the Cherokee name for it.
In 1838 the United States government forced the Cherokee from their lands in the southeastern region of North America along with the other Native American tribes which were
affected by this relocation. Despite the fact that the tribes in the region had become fully
integrated into the economics of the region, even the Native Americans working the plantations
were forcibly removed and set upon the trail to what is now Oklahoma. The deportation of the
Native Americans from this region was spurred on by greed as gold was discovered in the
Georgia area and gold speculators began trespassing on the Cherokee lands in an effort to stake
their claim to wealth. Because of this the state of Georgia attempted to extend its laws over the
Cherokee tribal lands in 1830 and the Cherokee Nation attempted to take the matter to the
Supreme Court. However, the Marshall court turned away the case, stating that the Cherokee
Nation was not a sovereign and independent nation and thus they did not see need to hear the
case. A year later the same court ruled that the Georgia legislature could not impose laws on the
Cherokee people either, as only the national government had authority in affairs dealing with the
Native Americans.

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Andrew Jackson, as the President of the United States, did not fully agree with Marshall's
decision in the matter and instead used the dispute between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation as
means to pressure the Cherokee into signing a removal treaty per the Indian Removal Act of
1830. The treaty passed through Congress by a single vote, and Jackson signed the bill into law
which was then imposed by his successor, President Martin Van Buren who allowed Georgia, as
well as Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee to use an armed force of roughly seven
thousand men comprised of militia, army regulars, and volunteers to forcibly bring over thirteen
thousand Cherokee Natives to concentration camps which had been constructed at the United
States Indian Agency near Cleveland, Tennessee. As the military corralled these Native
Americans under the command of General Winfield Scott, they burned the Cherokee homes,
destroying and looting their property without regard for the Cherokee's opinions on the matters.
Many Cherokee died in these concentration camps as disease, lack of food, and the cold took its
toll on the prisoners held there.
In the winter of 1838 the Cherokee were forced to begin their march across the Nunna
daul Isunyithe Trail Where They Cried. The majority of the Natives had little in the way of
clothing with them and nothing more to walk in than their moccasins. The march left from Red
Clay, Tennessee, which was the last capital of the Cherokee Nation in the eastern regions of the
United States. To make matters worse, the Cherokee had been given used blankets from a
hospital in Tennessee which had been dealing with an epidemic of small pox just before the
Natives' march began. As their population became infected as well, the forces in charge of
keeping the Native Americans on track routed them far out of their way to avoid towns and the
like for fear of spreading the small pox to the white folk who lived there. After making their way
through Tennessee and Kentucky, the Cherokee people arrived in Illinois by way of Golconda

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around the beginning of December, 1838. The ferry at the river here charged them roughly ten
times the typical price to cross and forced the Native Americans to wait until all others seeking to
use the ferry had crossed, leaving them to take shelter under Mantle Rock during this
exceptionally cold winter. Many of the Cherokee died here as they waited, and some others were
even murdered. The local government did not seem to care, and even sued the national
government for burial expenses as though they were just a nuisance to deal with. As the
Cherokee continued to march the trail, they eventually came to resettle in the zone designated to
be their destination near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and while the march took a serious toll on their
population, they were able to recuperate and rebound to become the largest Native American
group in the United States today.
The Trail of Tears included routes marched by the Native Americans from Georgia,
Alabama, and North Carolina through Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, and Missouri to
eventually end in Oklahoma. From the initial inception until its end, the concentration camps
and the Trail of Tears itself claimed the lives of approximately four thousand Cherokee Indians.
Because of this, as well as the casualties among the other Native American Nations, the Trail has
sometimes been referred to as a "death march", especially when referencing the Cherokee march
across the mid-west in 1838.
The way that the Cherokee people and the other Native American tribes were treated in
regards to the Trail of Tears goes a long way to show how the American people regarded the
Natives during this time period. The willingness of the people as well as the national and state
governments to accept and endorse the United States Indian Policy displays how the Native
Americans were viewed as less-than-people, nearly on par with uncivilized animals if it were not
for the fact that the American people actually took measures to protect their livestock. The way

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that the Native Americans were "herded" together and then forced to march from their
homelands to somewhere unfamiliar to them without regard to any sort of civil liberties or
human rights only strengthens the idea that the people and governments of the United States did
not care for their safety or well-being, and the Supreme Court refusing to even hear the case of
the Cherokee Nation displays that they were not respected or considered equal to the citizens of
the United States in any way. Where even slaves were given basic considerations as somebody's
property, the Native Americans were cast out and away from everything they knew at a whim
because the local legislatures saw the need to expend their territories and secure the earnings of
the first gold rush of the United States.
No matter how you look at it, this event is a gross tragedy which people today can barely
comprehend. The conditions by which the Cherokee people and other Native American tribes
were forced to march west from their homes are things which we have never had to come close
to experiencing. Furthermore, the rampant diseases and having to constantly deal with the grief
of your people dying around you was surely traumatic for the survivors of the march. All of this
is made even worse by the fact that the white men who had been persecuting the Native
Americans for their land since they arrived were the ones behind all of this, despite the fact that
the Cherokee people had become fully included in the economics of the south-east prior to this
sorrowful event. However, the Cherokee people have shown their pride and resilience by
weathering these trials and surviving it all to prove their strength as a nation of people who still
have strong cultural heritages today.
In conclusion, the Cherokee people suffered greatly in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century due to the greed of the Americans wanting ever more in their desire to control
more and more of everything which surrounded them. The land, the gold, the rights and claims

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to everything else they could get from the land which the Cherokee and others inhabited. All the
while they traded with the Native Americans in nearly every facet of the local economics without
ever stopping to consider that these tribes were people just like them. Instead they passed
policies and laws allowing such a tragic event to occur. The Cherokee people suffered greatly as
they marched as a nation of people across several thousand miles of mostly wilderness at the
direction of the armed forces much the way a shepherd herds their animals. Through it all, the
Cherokee people endured and many years later would be granted the rights they should have had
from the beginning as all people deserve. While less than ten thousand of them survived the
death march, they flourish once again today both in their tribal lands and among the American
people as citizens, and I believe we'll all see to it that such an event never happens again.

Words: 1,528

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Works Cited

Anderson, W. L. (1991). Cherokee removal: before and after. Athens: University of Georgia
Press.
Brinkley, A. (2009). American history a survey (13th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hill, S. (2008, January 16). Cherokee Indian Removal. Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved
March 27, 2011, from http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1433
Top 25 American Indian Tribes for the United States: 1990 and 1980. (n.d.). U.S. Bureau of the
Census. Retrieved March 27, 2011, from
www.census.gov/population/socdemo/race/indian/ailang1.txt
Trail of Tears National Historic Trail - stories (U.S. National Park Service). (2010, October 7).
U.S. National Park Service - Experience Your America. Retrieved March 27, 2011, from
http://www.nps.gov/trte/historyculture/stories.htm