INDIAN REMOVAL, Cherokee Trail of Tears, Cherokee Indian Nation Oklahoma,
and Indian Territory History
INDIAN REMOVAL
In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, the United
States cajoled, bribed, arrested, and ultimately removed approximately seventy thousand American
Indians out of their ancestral lands in the American South. Although President Andrew Jackson is often deemed the architect of this program, the removal of the Chickasaw,
Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole began years before the 1830 Indian Removal Act and Jackson's
subsequent use of the military to relocate the Indians.
In 1802 the state of Georgia
agreed to cede its westernmost lands to the federal government, and in return the government vowed to extinguish the Indian
title to lands within Georgia as soon
as possible. In the following years the United States
made only a few serious efforts to live up to that promise. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, President Thomas Jefferson pressured the Cherokee and other Indian nations to exchange their eastern domains voluntarily
for regions in the newly acquired western territory. Only a few tribes accepted the offer. After the War of 1812 the United States obtained thousands of acres of Creek lands in Georgia
and Alabama, but the acquisition did not accompany a larger
plan for Creek removal.
Finally, in the 1820s, Georgians began to demand that the United States extinguish the Indian title to lands within
their state. President James Monroe determined that arranging the exchange of acreage in the East for areas in the West was
the best means to accomplish this goal. While the federal government tried to create inducements to convince the Southeastern
Indians to leave their homes, the discovery of gold in Georgia
led to more aggressive demands for immediate removal.
The election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 encouraged Georgia
and its land-hungry settlers. Jackson made his position clear
in his first message to Congress. He told the Cherokees that they had no constitutional means to resist and that it was in their best interest voluntarily to move west. Staying would lead to their destruction.
As Congress debated the issues, several Cherokees negotiated a removal agreement with the United States. Major Ridge, a Cherokee planter and soldier, his son John Ridge, and his nephew Elias Boudinot conducted these
negotiations with the United States despite
the expressed wishes of the majority of their nation. Most Cherokees, including Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation John Ross, protested and tried to stop Ridge and his so-called Treaty Party.
On May 28, 1830, while Ridge and his supporters negotiated terms of
removal with the United States, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. This law provided the president
with $500,000 to establish districts west of the Mississippi River, to trade eastern tribal
lands for those districts, to compensate the Indians for the cost of their removal and the improvements on their homesteads,
and to pay one years worth subsistence to those who went west. Armed with this authority, President Jackson authorized agents
to negotiate and enforce treaties.
Chief John Ross hired former attorney general William Wirt to represent
the Cherokee in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and then in Worcester v. Georgia (1832). In each case the
U.S. Supreme Court recognized the sovereignty of the Cherokee tribe. The latter determined that Georgia could not make laws for the Cherokee people. The Supreme Court's rulings,
however, could not prevent forced removal. Georgia and the United States ignored the ruling and refused to recognize
Cherokee sovereignty.
President Jackson embraced Ridge and the Cherokee minority, and together they
signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. Ridge ceded all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi
in return for territory in present northeastern Oklahoma,
five million dollars, transportation west, and one year of subsistence. Amid a chorus of protests by Cherokees and their American
supporters, the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty. Nearly two thousand Cherokees moved west in accordance to the agreement,
but most of the nation remained. They still hoped that their Constitutional victories and the illegalities of the treaty might
be recognized. In 1838 the United States
sent armed soldiers to enforce the law. The federal troops confined the Cherokees in disease-ridden camps for several months
before forcing them to proceed west. Death and hardship was common, and nearly one in four Cherokees died.
The other southeastern Indian nations experienced similar stories of upheaval
and dislocation. Although each resisted, the Choctaw (1831-32), the Chickasaw (1837-38), the Creek, and the Seminole too found
their ways westward on Trails of Tears. Divisions within the Creek Nation led to the execution of William McIntosh, one if
its prominent chiefs, for signing the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs. Ironically, McIntosh was killed in accordance to a law
that he had created only years earlier. Despite their continued opposition, most of the Creek Indians trekked west in 1836.
Hundreds of Seminoles moved to Indian Territory in 1832, but many more refused to leave the swamps of Florida. Instead, they fought the Second Seminole War (1835-42), and some moved further
into the Everglades.
Recommended
Reading: The Cherokee Removal:
A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford
Series in History and Culture) (Paperback). Description: This book tells the compelling story of American ethnic cleansing
against the Cherokee nation through an admirable combination of primary documents and the editors' analyses. Perdue and Green
begin with a short but sophisticated history of the Cherokee from their first interaction with Europeans to their expulsion
from the East to the West; a region where Georgia, North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama
connect. Continued below...
The reader
is directed through a variety of documents commenting on several important themes: the "civilizing" of the Cherokee (i.e.
their adoption of European culture), Georgia's leading role in pressuring the Cherokee off their land and demanding the federal
government to remove them by force, the national debate between promoters and opponents of expulsion, the debate within the
Cherokee nation, and a brief look at the deportation or forced removal. Conveyed in the voices of the Cherokee and the
framers of the debate, it allows the reader to appreciate the complexity of the situation. Pro-removal Americans even made
racist judgments of the Cherokee but cast and cloaked their arguments in humanitarian rhetoric. Pro-emigration Cherokee harshly
criticize the Cherokee leadership as corrupt and possessing a disdain for traditional Cherokee culture. American defenders
and the Cherokee leadership deploy legal and moral arguments in a futile effort to forestall American violence. “A compelling
and stirring read.”
Recommended
Viewing: The Trail of Tears: Cherokee Legacy (2006), Starring: James Earl Jones and Wes Studi; Director: Chip Richie, Steven R. Heape.
Description: The Trail Of Tears: Cherokee Legacy is an engaging two
hour documentary exploring one of America's darkest periods in which President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 consequently
transported Native Americans of the Cherokee Nation to the bleak and unsupportive Oklahoma
Territory in the year 1838. Deftly presented by the talents of Wes Studi
("Last of the Mohicans" and "Dances with Wolves"), James Earl Jones, and James Garner, The Trail Of Tears: Cherokee Legacy
also includes narrations of famed celebrities Crystal Gayle, Johnt Buttrum, Governor Douglas Wilder, and Steven R. Heape.
Continued below...
Includes numerous
Cherokee Nation members which add authenticity to the production… A welcome DVD addition to personal, school, and community
library Native American history collections. The Trail Of Tears: Cherokee Legacy is strongly recommended for its informative
and tactful presentation of such a tragic and controversial historical occurrence in 19th century American history.
Recommended Reading: Indian
Removal (The Norton Casebooks in History). Description: This casebook traces the evolution of U.S. Indian
policy from its British Colonial origins to the implementation of removal after 1830. Placing Indian removal in political
and social contexts, the editors have selected contemporary primary-source documents that reveal the motives and perspectives
of both whites and Indians and cover the complicated influences of Jacksonian Democracy and the early stirrings of what would
later be referred to as Manifest Destiny. Continued below...
Letters, treaties, and journal entries give readers a sense of the ordeal of removal for American Indians.
Recommended Reading: Indian
Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (423 pages) (University of Oklahoma Press)
Recommended
Reading:
The Cherokee Nation: A History. Description:
Conley's book, "The Cherokee Nation: A History" is an eminently readable, concise but thoughtful account of the Cherokee
people from prehistoric times to the present day. The book is formatted in such a way as to make it an ideal text for high
school and college classes. At the end of each chapter is a source list and suggestions for further reading. Also at the end
of each chapter is an unusual but helpful feature- a glossary of key terms. The book contains interesting maps, photographs
and drawings, along with a list of chiefs for the various factions of the Cherokee tribe and nation. Continued below...
In addition
to being easily understood, a principal strength of the book is that the author questions some traditional beliefs and sources
about the Cherokee past without appearing to be a revisionist or an individual with an agenda in his writing. One such example
is when Conley tells the story of Alexander Cuming, an Englishman who took seven Cherokee men with him to England
in 1730. One of the Cherokee, Oukanekah, is recorded as having said to the King of England: "We look upon the Great King George
as the Sun, and as our Father, and upon ourselves as his children. For though we are red, and you are white our hands and
hearts are joined together..." Conley wonders if Oukanekah actually said those words and points out that the only version
we have of this story is the English version. There is nothing to indicate if Oukanekah spoke in English or Cherokee, or if
his words were recorded at the time they were spoken or were written down later. Conley also points out that in Cherokee culture,
the Sun was considered female, so it is curious that King George would be looked upon as the Sun. The "redness" of Native
American skin was a European perception. The Cherokee would have described themselves as brown. But Conley does not overly
dwell on these things. He continues to tell the story using the sources available. The skill of Conley in communicating his
ideas never diminishes. This book is highly recommended as a good place to start the study of Cherokee history. It serves
as excellent reference material and belongs in the library of anyone serious about the study of Native Americans.
Recommended
Reading: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Description: 1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question
of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed
the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused
territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans.
For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann
brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come
over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the
Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians,
rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that
even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. Continued below...
Mann is well
aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise
scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening
revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were
there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later
and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and
unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest
epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity,
which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that
held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. Includes outstanding photos and maps.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grant
Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1932). Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American
Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, ed., The Cherokee Removal:
A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995). Andrew K. Frank, © Oklahoma Historical Society.
Indian Removal Act, Trail of Tears 1838, Treaty of New Echota 1835, History Forced Removal of
Cherokees West, Oklahoma Territory, Cherokee Indian Nation, Principal Chief John Ross Cherokee Nation Oklahoma
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