Migration from the original Cherokee Nation began in the eary 1800's as Cherokee, wary of white encroachment, moved west and settled in other areas of the country. White resentment of the Cherokee had been building and reached a pinnacle after gold was discovered in Georgia. Possessed with gold fever and a thirst for expansion, the white communites turned on their Indian neighbors, and the U.S. government decided it was time for the Cherokee to leave behind their farms, their land and their homes.
A group known as the Old Settlers had moved in 1817 to lands given them in Arkansas where again they extablished a government and a peaceful way of life. Later, they too, were forced into Indian Territory. Presidnet Andrew Jackson, whose command and life saved due to 500 Cherokee allies at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, showed his appreciation a few years later by authorizing the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
In following the recommedation of President James Monroe in his final address to Congress in 1825, Jackson sanetioned an attitude that had persisted for many years among many white immigrants. Even Thomas Jefferson, who often cited the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution, supported Indian Removal as early 1802.
The displacement of Native people was not wanting for eloquent opposition. Senators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay spoke out against removal. Reverend Samuel Worcester, missionary to the Cherokee, challenged Georgia's attempt to extinguish Indian title to land in the state, winning the case before the Supreme Court, Worcester vs. Georgia, 1832, and Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, 1831, are condidered the two most influential decisions in Indian law. The U.S. Supreme Court rulded for Georgia in 1831 case, but in Worcester vs. Georgia, the court affirmed Cherokee sovereignty.
President Andrew Jackson defied the decision of the court and ordered the removal, an act of defiance that established the U.S. government's precedent for the removal of many Native Americans from their ancestral homelands. the U.S. government used the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 to justify the removal.
The treaty, signed by 100 Cherokee known as the Treaty Party, relinqusished all lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for land in Indian Territory and the promise of money, livestock, various provisons and tools, and other benefits. When the pro-removal Cherokee leaders signed the Treaty of New Echota, they also signed their own death warrants.
The Cherokee National Council earlier had passed a law that called for the death penalty for anyone who agreed to give up tribal land. the signing and the removal led to better factionlism and the deaths of most of the Treaty Party leasers in Indian Territory. Opposition to the removal was led by Chief John Ross, a mixed-blood of Scottish and one-eighth Cherokee descent. The Ross party and most Cherokees opposed the New Echota Treaty, but Georgia and the U.S. government prevailed and used it as justification to force almost all of the 17,000 Cherokee from their southeastern homeland. Under orders from President Jackson and in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Army began enforcement of the Removal Act.
More than 3,000 Cherokees were rounded up in the summer of 1838 and loaded onto boats that traveled the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers into Indian Territory. Many were held in prison camps awaiting their fate. In the winter of 1838-39, 14,000 were marched almost 1,000 miles through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas into rugged Indian Territory. An estimated 4,000 died from hunger, exposure and disease. The journey became an eternal memory as the "trail were they cried: for the Cherokees and other removed tribes. Today it is remembered as the "TRAIL OF TEARS."
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