The Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma, was one of the most inhumane policies in American history – but it wasn’t an isolated incident. In 1831, nearly 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation were forced under armed guard to leave their native lands in the southeastern United States to trek more than 1,000 miles to what eventually would become the state of Oklahoma. Almost 4,000 Cherokees died along the way, never making it to the land designated by the U.S. government as Indian Territory.
The Trail of Tears wasn’t just one route.
The first group of Cherokees departed Tennessee in June 1838 and headed to Indian Territory by boat, a journey that took them along the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi and Arkansas rivers. Heat and extended drought soon made travel along this water route impractical, so that fall and winter thousands more Cherokees were forced to trek from Tennessee to present-day Oklahoma via one of several overland routes. Federal officials allowed Chief John Ross to take charge of these overland removals, and he organized the Indians into 13 groups, each comprised of nearly a thousand people. Although there were some wagons and horses, most people had to walk.
Imagine you are a little girl in the late 1830s. You and your family had lived in the Cherokee tribe for generations. Then one day when you returned from playing in the fields, you find your family gone and your house is ransacked. A short time later you get placed inside a cattle stockade, and after a few months you realize you’ll never see your family again.
This is what happened to a lot of small kids on that dreadful day. It was painful for many Indians to watch their lands taken, the people die, and have to watch their people abused and mistreated. This was a very bad time for Native Americans. The Trail of Tears was the biggest crime against the indigenous population, the crime that wasn’t considered a crime.
Removal of the Choctaw Nation began even earlier, in 1830. Like the Cherokees, they were forced to leave their homes in the South and a way of life developed over millennia to start over in an alien environment on the prairie. But the Cherokee and Choctaw nations are only two of the tribes with a removal story. There are 39 tribes in Oklahoma, five native to the state, that have stories to be told – each with its own trail of tears.
The Trail of Tears set a national precedent for the confiscation of Indian lands. What this means is it started the Removal Era, and later the Land Run Era that included land that had once been Cherokee without any respect for the people who lived there before. They wanted the land for a few reasons, but a couple are: farming, and belief in the existence of gold. They were told that it would only happen once, but it continued on with different tribes later, after it happened during the Trail of Tears.
Davy Crockett objected to Indian removal.
Frontiersman Davy Crockett, whose grandparents were killed by Creeks and Cherokees, was a scout for Andrew Jackson during the Creek War (1813-14). However, while serving as a U.S. congressman from Tennessee, Crockett broke with President Jackson over the Indian Removal Act, calling it unjust. Despite warnings that his opposition to Indian removal would cost him his seat in Congress, where he’d served since 1827, Crockett said, “I would sooner be honestly and politically damned than hypocritically immortalized.”
A fact you may not know is that the Trail of Tears represented the largest percentage of deaths within a single indigenous tribe due to the action of the U.S. government in American Indian history. This killed around 4,000 members of the Cherokee tribe. These people died because of lots of reasons: poor weather conditions, little food and water, long walks with little rest, sickness with no medicine, and lastly being killed by soldiers.
The Long Walk
By the early 1860s, Americans of European descent began settling in and around Navajo lands, leading to conflict between Navajo people on one side and settlers and the U.S. Army on the other. In response to the fighting, the Army created a plan to move all Navajos from their homeland. The forced removal of the Navajo, which began in January 1864 and lasted two months, came to be known as the “Long Walk.” According to historic accounts, more than 8,500 men, women, and children were forced to leave their homes in northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. In the dead of winter, they made the 300-plus-mile trek to a desolate internment camp along the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico called the Bosque Redondo Reservation, where the military maintained an outpost, Fort Sumner. Along the way, approximately 200 Navajos died of starvation and exposure to the elements.
Legacy Of Forced March Still Haunts Navajo Nation
Musician Clarence Clearwater retraced his great-great-great-grandfather’s footsteps along what Navajo and Mescalero Apache people call the Long Walk. In a series of marches starting in 1864, 9,500 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache were forced by the U.S. Army to walk 400 miles from their reservation in northeastern Arizona to the edge of the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico; like the forced march known as the Trail of Tears, thousands died. During their internment, the Navajo and Mescalero were prevented from practicing ceremonies, singing songs, or praying in their own language. Daily depredations at the reservation were palpable on every level. Food rationing was both meager and completely foreign (coffee beans, white flour and rank beef), while the lack of wood for heating and cooking during the bitterly cold winters led to illness, and high infant mortality. When a smallpox-like disease was contracted from the military, it ravaged the captives. The suffering from exposure, starvation, and sickness took an estimated 1500 lives. In 1865 close to 350 Mescalero made their escape and returned to their sacred Sacramento Mountains. Nearly 1,000 Navajos also fled but more than 7,000 remained.
The Navajo culture is intrinsically tied to the earth. Navajo artist Shonto Begay says many live in or frequently return to the place where their umbilical cords are buried. “When the umbilical cord is buried with honor among the Navajos, this is what holds you,” Begay says. “When your umbilical cord is buried in the earth, and you know the ground where it is, you know, you feel at home and welcome anywhere in the world.” The Long Walk was among many attempts by the federal government to wipe out native culture. Others include sending native children to boarding schools to eradicate their traditions. Begay says he was out herding sheep at the age of 5 when a man driving a flatbed truck gave him candy and hauled him away.
In the early 1980s I reclaimed my great-grandmother’s name, Shonto.” Shonto means “light dancing on water.” It’s also the name of his town — his home — where he remains connected today. He wants his children and grandchildren to know that their ancestors’ suffering and determination meant something. He tells them, “Hey, your forefathers survived. Make something of it. Honor it.” This month marks the 150th anniversary an event known among the Navajo and Mescalero Apache people as the Long Walk. In 1864, the U.S. Army forced their ancestors to walk more than 400 miles from their traditional lands in northern Arizona to a desolate reservation in eastern New Mexico. Thousands died along the way.
Indigenous Peoples Literature 