The Trail of Tears

Before being contacted by westerners, Cherokee culture had developed and thrived for almost 1,000 years in the southeastern United States, in Georgia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and parts of Kentucky and Alabama.

Since first contact with European explorers in the 1500s, the Cherokee Nation had been recognized as one of the most progressive among American Indian tribes. Life of the traditional Cherokee remained unchanged as late as 1710, which is marked as the beginning of Cherokee trade with the whites. After contact, the Cherokees acquired many aspects of the white neighbors with whom many had intermarried. Soon they had shaped a government and a society that matched the most "civilized" of the time.

The period of frontier contact from 1540-1786, was marked by white expansion and the cession of Cherokee lands to the colonies in exchange for goods. As the population grew, the colonists pushed farther west into the territories occupied by the American Indians. By the time Andrew Jackson became President in 1829, the native population east of the Mississippi River had dwindled to 125,000, while the non-Indian population had risen to 13 million.

President Jackson saw Indian Removal as an opportunity to provide for the needs of the white farmers and businessmen. The government thus decided it was time for the Cherokees to leave behind their farms, their land and their homes and head west.

Many members of the “Five Civilized Tribes” (including the Cherokee, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) wanted to stay in their lands east of the Mississippi River.

In 1830 the Congress of the United States passed the "Indian Removal Act." Although many Americans were against the act, most notably Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett, none the less it passes. Jackson quickly signed the bill. The Cherokees attempted to fight removal legally by challenging the removal laws in the Supreme Court and by establishing an independent Cherokee Nation. In 1832, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Cherokee on the issue in Worcester v. Georgia. In this case Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was sovereign, making the removal laws invalid. The Cherokee would have to agree to removal in a treaty. The treaty then would have to be ratified by the Senate.
As part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, federal agents misled tribal leaders into signing removal treaties with the government.

In 1838, the Georgia militia was ordered to force the Cherokee out of Georgia. 17,000 Cherokees were brutally rounded up and marched to the newly designated Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Thousands were forced to leave behind their homes, livestock, crops and places of spiritual significance.

The journey itself became known as "The Trail of Tears" or, as a direct translation from Cherokee, "The Trail Where They Cried" ("Nunna daul Tsuny"). The Indians’ travels were marked by outbreaks of cholera, bitter cold, inadequate supplies, and death from starvation and exhaustion. Hunger, disease and exposure to extreme weather conditions led to the death of approximately four-thousand Native Americans.