Trail of Tears

The Trail of Tears

Introduction

The Trail of Tears, or “the trail where they cried” as it is sometimes called, refers to the grueling journeys undertaken by me and my fellow men, Cherokees west across the Mississippi River to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. The other major southeastern Native American tribes; the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole were also removed to the Indian Territory, and their relocations are sometimes referred to as the Trail of Tears a phrase developed long after the actual removal of the tribes .

I being an Indian and a part of a tribe came across the various events that took place in the nineteenth century era and highlights upon the decade which tells that during the 1830s and 1840s, my entire Indian nations, in large groups with members numbering up to a thousand or more, traveled hundreds of miles on foot and by boat, in summer and winter, without adequate provisions. Overall thousands died from privation, disease, and spoiled rations on the Trail of Tears. According to my experience and being one of them, the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole populations declined by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent as a consequence of their removal. One of our tribe The Choctaws; lost perhaps as much as 15 percent of their population.

However, I went through that winter of 1838-39, the time when my Cherokee Indian Nation was forcibly evicted, by government fiat, from its native lands in north-western Georgia. However, I came across that my Cherokee people suffered grievously during an 800-mile forced march to their new homes west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Of some 17,000 who began the westward trek, about 4,000 died of hunger, exposure, and disease. Later I and other Cherokee survivors called the terrible journey Nuna-da-ut-sun'y ("The Trail Where we all cried") or The Trail of Tears. It was undoubtedly one of the worst disgraces in American history .

Whereas, it won't be wrong to highlight my personal experience about the Five Civilized Tribes as I am one of them (the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole) of Indians in the south-eastern United States, my tribe which is the Cherokee were, in the white man's thinking, the most civilized. They lived in well-built log cabins, prospered as farmers and hunters, and established schools, a newspaper, and their own written language. They were a proud and independent people whose territorial sovereignty became a heated issue to Georgia's white settlers. However, with increasing attitude in the early 19th century, the whites looked covetously at our large, fertile Cherokee farmlands. When we Indians decided to stop selling our land, the whites sought to take it away. My tribe Cherokee relied on our treaty rights when contending with the Georgia state authorities, who attempted to remove the resisting Indians. Georgia's effort to get our territory became a fight in the courts until President Andrew Jackson failed to uphold the Indians' rights and overlooked Georgia's steady encroachment on their ...