1838: The Trail of Tears: forced to resettle in what became Oklahoma, many Cherokee died on the brutal journey west.

• Author: Bowman, Rex
• Position: Times Past

With bayonets fixed to their guns, small squads of U.S. soldiers stealthily set out on May 26, 1838, to surround the little cabins in Georgia where the Cherokee lived. The soldiers then rushed inside, seizing entire families and herding them into stockades. From the stockades, the Cherokee would be led on a forced march to Oklahoma.

"Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the trail that led to the stockade," wrote ethnologist James Mooney in 1900, after interviewing many of those forced from their homes. "Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their [spinning] wheels and children from their play."

Many who looked back saw their homes in flames, their cattle, pigs, and horses scattered or gone.

So began what the Cherokee came to call the Trail of Tears: the deadly, forced trek from their homes in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee to unknown lands west of the Mississippi River. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Indians died during the brutal three-month-long trek west while land-hungry white settlers took possession of their farms.

A 1,000-MILE TREK WEST

According to a magazine correspondent who covered the marches, the soldiers drove the Cherokee through rivers without giving them time to remove their shoes. A deaf Indian who turned right instead of left was shot dead, and a Cherokee was given 100 lashes after striking a soldier who had pushed his wife.

In little more than a month after the soldiers' initial raid, 5,000 Cherokee had been sent to Oklahoma, then known as the Indian Territory, because it was where the government planned to resettle eastern tribes. The remaining Cherokee, between 12,000 and 13,000, began the forced march west in October 1838.

They traveled a variety of land and water routes through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. Many succumbed to colds, dysentery, and diarrhea. The last group straggled into Indian Territory in March 1839. Between 800 and 4,000 died in the stockades and along the way.

INDIAN REMOVAL ACT

The Cherokee's 1,000-mile march was the result of the Indian Removal Act that President Andrew Jackson signed into law in 1830. The law stated that if tribes living east of the Mississippi wished to exchange their lands for lands to the west, the federal government would agree to the swap. The law mentioned nothing about removing the Indians by...