Trail of Tears

The Trail of Tears is the name given to the forced removal of about 60,000 Native Americans of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations from their homelands in the south-eastern United States to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River, between 1830 and 1850. Enslaved Black people owned by members of these nations were moved with them. Thousands died of exposure, disease and hunger on the journey or soon after arrival. Many scholars describe the removals as ethnic cleansing, and some classify them as genocide.

The five nations held large territories in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida and neighbouring states. Settlers wanted these lands for farming, and pressure grew after the War of 1812, when the Treaty of Fort Jackson forced the Creek to give up some 23 million acres. In Georgia, the discovery of gold on Cherokee land near Dahlonega at the end of the 1820s brought a rush of trespassers, and the state moved to extend its laws over Cherokee territory.

In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which empowered President Andrew Jackson to negotiate treaties exchanging Native lands in the East for land in the West, much of it within the territory gained through the Louisiana Purchase. The Cherokee went to court. In Worcester v. Georgia in 1832 the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's laws had no force in Cherokee territory, but the federal government did not act to protect the Cherokee from the state, and Jackson pressed for a removal treaty.

The Choctaw were the first to sign, under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and were moved in stages from 1831. A harsh winter, floods and food shortages took a heavy toll, and estimates of Choctaw deaths range from about 2,500 to 6,000. After treaties, fraud and illegal settlement stripped the Creek of their remaining lands in Alabama, and following fighting in 1836, the army removed more than 15,000 Creek, of whom about 3,500 are thought to have died. The Chickasaw sold their lands and bought territory from the Choctaw, moving west from 1837. Many Seminole in Florida resisted, and the Second Seminole War lasted until 1842; most were eventually deported, but several hundred stayed in the Everglades.

On 29 December 1835 a small Cherokee faction, the Treaty Party, signed the Treaty of New Echota, giving up all Cherokee land in the East. The elected Cherokee council and Principal Chief John Ross rejected it, and more than 16,000 Cherokee signed a petition against it, but the Senate ratified it in 1836. About 2,000 Cherokee left voluntarily.

In May 1838, under President Martin Van Buren, General Winfield Scott began rounding up the remaining Cherokee with a force of about 7,000 soldiers and militia. People were held in camps in Tennessee and then sent west in groups of around a thousand, many of them travelling through rain, snow and freezing weather. Estimates of the number of Cherokee who died range from about 4,000 to 8,000. In Cherokee the journey is remembered by a phrase meaning "the trail where they cried".

The removals were driven by population growth, the spread of cotton growing and the extension of slavery across the South, and the vacated lands were quickly opened to white settlement. The removed nations rebuilt their governments in Indian Territory, today part of Oklahoma, while groups that avoided removal, such as the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, remained in the East. In 1987 federal law set aside about 2,200 miles of trails to mark the routes taken by 17 Cherokee detachments.

Our 1815 map shows the United States before the removals, when much of the South-East was still the land of the five nations; our 1878 map shows the country after the removals.