Every so often somebody brings up Native (now called FIRST AMERICANS) Americans and how they were treated after the white man landed on Americas Eastern shores. It came up today on a Yahoo group I'm on. It got to me. My reply:



Tell that to my several relatives that died on the trail of tears!

My great great grandmother escaped the forced march and was protected by a bi-racial household until it was safe to leave. My great great grandmother never saw any of her family members again.

My favorite flower is the Cherokee Rose. Today it still blooms along the trail paths. My paternal grandmothers maiden name was Hatie Rose. Hatie was the 1/2 breed that harbored my great great grandmother.




http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops... of Tears

In 1838, the United States government forcibly removed more than 16,000 Cherokee Indian people from their homelands in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia, and sent them to Indian Territory (today known as Oklahoma). The impact to the Cherokee was devastating. Hundreds of Cherokee died during their trip west, and thousands more perished from the consequences of relocation. This tragic chapter in American and Cherokee history became known as the Trail of Tears, and culminated the implementation of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which mandated the removal of all American Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River to lands in the West.

Early in the 19th century, the United States felt threatened by England and Spain, who held land in the western part of the continent. At the same time, American citizens clamored for more land. President Thomas Jefferson proposed the creation of a buffer zone between U.S. and European holdings, to be inhabited by eastern American Indians. This plan would also allow for American expansion westward from the original colonies to the Mississippi River.

Between 1816 and 1840, tribes located between the original states and the Mississippi River, including Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, signed more than 40 treaties ceding their lands to the U.S. In his 1829 inaugural address, President Andrew Jackson set a policy to relocate eastern Indians. In 1830 his plan was endorsed by the Congress passed the Indian Removal Act to force those remaining to move west of the Mississippi. Between 1830 and 1850, about 100,000 American Indians living between Michigan, Louisiana, and Florida moved west after the U.S. government coerced treaties or used the U.S. Army against those resisting. Many were treated brutally. An estimated 3,500 Creeks dies in Alabama and on their westward Journey.

Beginning in 1791 a series of treaties between the United States and the Cherokees living in Georgia gave recognition to the Cherokee as a nation with their own laws and customs. Nevertheless, treaties and agreements gradually whittled away at this land base, and in the late 1700s some Cherokees sought refuge from white interference by moving to northwestern Arkansas between the White and Arkansas Rivers. As more and more land cessions were forced on the Cherokees during the first two decades of the 1800s, the number moving to Arkansas increased. Then in 1819, the Cherokee National Council notified the federal government that it would no longer cede land, thus hardening their resolve to remain on their traditional homelands.

FULL article at link.


This picture, The Trail of Tears, was painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942. It commemorates the suffering of the Cherokee people under forced removal. If any depictions of the "Trail of Tears" were created at the time of the march, they have not survived.

Image Credit: The Granger Collection, New York

The trail map:

Nothing to do with the trail, but I thought I'd see who read the entire post.