Today we are going to talk about the Trail of Tears, specifically my grandmother’s family’s experience on the journey. We start in Georgia, where tens of thousands of acres of land had been occupied and cultivated since the 8000s BC by the indigenous people.
During the Manifest Destiny “delusion”, some American officials thought that the best way to solve what they were disgracefully calling an “Indian problem” was to “civilize” the Native Americans. To do this, they encouraged them convert to Christianity, taught them to speak and read English and had them adopt to European-style practices such as individual ownership of land and other property, such as owning African slaves.
So, here is a big shocker, in the winter of 1829, gold was discovered in great abundance upon Cherokee soil in Georgia after a little Cherokee boy living on Ward creek had sold a gold nugget to a white trader the year prior. Mining operations quickly sprang up. As prospectors rushed in, so did armed brigands claiming to be government agents, who paid no attention to the rights of the natives who were the legal possessors of the country. Their land was valuable and desired by the white settlers. Tensions with them and the Cherokee increased. They called it the ”Great Intrusion”. Sound familiar?
We talk about the California gold rush all the time on this podcast, but the rush in Georgia came in second for the most significant gold rush in the United States.
John Ross, the elected Chief of all the Cherokee Tribes did all he could. Laws were made benefiting the settlers, and the Cherokees homes were burned, fences and crops destroyed and their cattle was mutilated. Men were shot in cold blood as the lands were confiscated. Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross sent Chief Junaluska as an envoy to plead with President Jackson for protection for his people. Chief Junaluska knew President Andrew Jackson after he brought 500 warriors to help Jackson win the battle of the Horse Shoe. 33 of Junaluska’s men ended up dead. In the battle, when the Creek had Andrew Jackson at his mercy, Junaluska drove his tomahawk through the skull of the Creek warrior about to kill Jackson. But when Junaluska approached Jackson, his manner was cold and indifferent. “Sir, your audience has ended. There is nothing I can do for you.” The doom of the Cherokee was sealed.
In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. It was a tiny, wealthy minority of Cherokee who signed a fraudulent treaty that ceded their eastern lands. The Act gave the federal government power to relocate the native population to the west and move Americans into their cotton kingdom. It promised that their new land would remain unmolested forever, but the boundaries of “Native Land” diminished as the line of white settlement pushed westward. The gold extracted from Georgia those years would equate to over 22 million dollars in 2022.
Differences over remaining in their Southeastern homeland or moving to the West had split Cherokees before removal. Some Cherokee asked to postpone removal until the fall, and to voluntarily remove themselves. The delay was granted, provided they remain in internment camps.
Only 2,000 Cherokees had left their simple log cabins, cornfields, orchards, and livestock by 1838.
So, the government sent General Winfield Scott and thousands of soldiers to gather the remaining families in Eastern Cherokee Territory and put them in concentration camps before the removal.
As the Cherokee were arrested and dragged from their homes at the bayonet point that May, the American men looted their belongings and robbed their dead’s graves to get their jewelry and other little trinkets. A small child had died during the commotion and was lying on a bear skin couch. His family was preparing the little body for burial. All were arrested and driven out leaving the child in the cabin. Men working in the fields were arrested and driven to the stockades. Women were dragged from their homes
