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The History of The Cherokee and The Trail Of Tears
The best-known episode in Cherokee history was also the worst: the Trail of Tears,
the forced relocation of the Cherokee people from their ancestral home in the southeast to Oklahoma. The Cherokee had been
one of the most acculturated of Indian societies--an urban, Christian, agricultural, largely intermarried people who supported
the United States against other tribes. In the end this was all for nothing. Though some prominent Americans, such as Davy
Crockett and Daniel Webster, spoke against Removal, and though the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, President Andrew
Jackson, declaring "Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it," sent in the army. Fifteen to twenty thousand
Cherokee and their Indian neighbors (Choctaw, Muskogee, and others) were rounded up and herded to Oklahoma
in the winter of 1838-1839. Driven from their homes without being allowed to collect their possessions first, even their shoes,
these prosperous and largely citified Indians were no better equipped for an 800-mile forced march than a white suburb today
would be. Between four and eight thousand Cherokee people died of exposure, starvation, disease, and simple exhaustion along
the Trail of Tears. If you understand this, both the extent to which the Cherokees had adopted American standards of civilization
before the Removal and the ultimate futility of it, you will go a long way towards understanding the Cherokee mentality and
also the attitudes of other Indian peoples towards us.
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