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Directory of Trail of Tears Resources

Home > Society > Ethnicity > The Americas > Indigenous > Native Americans > Tribes, Nations and Bands > C > Cherokee > 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 died of exposure, starvation, disease, and simple exhaustion along the Trail of Tears.

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