...The Trail of Tears: Cherokee Tribe November 16th, 2015 The Trail of Tears remains one of the worst human rights disaster in United States history. At the beginning of the 1830’s, more than ten thousand Cherokees were taken from their homes. They were forced by the United States government to leave their homelands because of the white settlers. They ended up in the future State of Oklahoma. By the end of the decade very few Native Americans remained in the Southern United States. However due to the horrid conditions, masses of them died due to starvation during relocation. It caused a large amount of stress among the Cherokee people. This difficult journey was known as the Trail of Tears. Migration from the original Cherokee nation began in the early 1800’s. Some Cherokees moved west on their own and settled in other areas of the country. A group known as the old settlers had voluntarily moved in 1817 to lands given to them in Arkansas. While there, they established a government. Later, however, they were forced to migrate to Indian Territory. They were not given an alternative if they “wanted” to move or not. It wasn’t up to them as far as decision making. The move was extremely difficult and treacherous. In 1835 the United States government used the Treaty of New Echota to justify the removal. Known as the Treaty Party, signed by approximately one hundred Cherokees, it relinquished all lands, and the promise of livestock, various precision tools, and other benefits...
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...Tragedies of the Trail of Tears and the Holocaust The U.S government stole millions of dollars and millions of acres of land from the native americans. Likewise, the Nazi Regime stole the same from helpless Jewish people who were forced to live in ghettos. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning. When the white settlers first came to America they encountered the Native Americans they thought they were savages, and that they were dumb and could easily steal from them. The white settlers moved the Native Americans to oklahoma and in this process they stole from them and killed their livestock. They also killed them and stole their homes while they made the Native Americans walk all the from their homes to Oklahoma. This is very similar...
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...One thing that continued throughout history from the Trail of Tears was the attempt at land possession. The Native Americans were very worried that the United States would infringe upon their agreements and takeover their promised lands. According to Perdue and Green, various reasons accounted for Indian complaints, including the states that pushed for the intrusion of Indian lands and the defense against Indian retaliation to protect their homes. Georgia encourages their citizens to invade and inhabit the Native lands. This caused much controversy. These encouragements directly contravened the treaties that promised the rights to the land to the Natives (Perdue 24). One example of Indian-American conflict in Georgia was the infringement...
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...Book Review: John Ehle’s Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation The book Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle is a book about the Cherokee Indians and the suffering they endured during the late 1830s. Ehle wrote a book that was more than just a documentation of what happened on the Trail of Tears; he wrote a detailed documentation of Native American history. It centered more around the Cherokees than any other textbook could considering it helped visualize who the Cherokees were as people and not what they went through during such a political time period. Ehle used an abundance of historical facts to convey the Cherokee way of life before and during the Trail of Tears like no author of any textbook ever could. Furthermore, the way Ehle helped the audience envision the Cherokees is what I really enjoyed about this book. Starting out Ehle shapes the Cherokees in a way that helps the audience distinguish that they were not entirely blameless for what actually happened. He helps us take a look into the darker sides of the Cherokee culture we many not read in our textbooks or generally many websites that describe the culture. White Americans are generally blamed for always pushing themselves forward and at the rise to the top stepping over whomever comes their way, but now we see who America was stepping over. Regarding this, Cherokees were not so different from White Americans. Just like many other races the Cherokees held...
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...The Trail of Tears is a phrase known to define the forceful expulsion of the five civilized Native tribes, away from their traditional lands and forced migration to new Indian ground which was west of the Mississippi River. These tribes were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and the Seminoles. When Andrew Jackson was elected president in the year 1828, the Natives soon became a part of the next racial targeting. President Andrew Jackson encouraged the expulsion; the Congress authorized this removal policy set by the president in 1830. The Indian Removal Act was passed on May 28, 1830; they were involuntarily removed from their homes and forced to move west. The Indian Removal Act was defined as swapping the U.S. western area for the...
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...The Trail of Tears In the early 1800’s, The United States was a young, but ambitious nation. Despite being a more primitive period in time, there was still the modern day lust for land and wealth. Native Americans occupied the land early Americans desired. In spite of attempts by the Native Americans to acclimate to American society, they were still forced from their tribal lands. Their treacherous journey west became known as The Trail of Tears. This forced mass exodus has left a blemish on the legacies of both President Andrew Jackson and America. The Trail of Tears was the path the Native Americans were forced to take from the southeastern United States to west of the Mississippi River. The entire length of this forced journey was...
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...US History to 1877 Trail of Tears: Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle Having little knowledge of the Cherokee removal and the history that took place in this moment in America’s past, the book Trail of Tears: Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle, offers an insight to the politics, social dynamics and class struggles the Cherokee Nation faced in the late 1830s. The book was very comprehensive and the scope of the book covers nearly 100 years of Native American History. Ehle captures the history of the Native American people by showing the readers what led to the events infamously known as the Trail of Tears. The author uses real military orders, journals, and letters which aid in creating a book that keeps the reader interested in the history that unfolded. The book is very dense with research and the style it is written in is from a contemporary voice, in other words, as the reader you sometimes get the feeling of emotion involved and other times there is a history textbook feeling from the author, which made the reading slightly difficult. I expected the novel to be very emotional narrative that would be sympathetic towards the Cherokee people, but it was a mixture of narrative plus historical facts. The book portrays the actual history, through the use of the many primary sources mentioned earlier, of the Cherokee people, but I believe that the author used that to frame the personalities of his characters as to what their decision making might...
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...A Journal Entry: Trail of Tears A Journal Entry: Trail of Tears Summer 1838 It has just been announced that to us that there are some among us that have signed a treaty selling away our lands from out from under us with President Jackson. I do not understand why our own people would do such a thing. We have been told that if we do not leave, General Scott will come and force us off our lands. (Schultz, 2012) My husband says that it is only because gold was discovered here that the white man is pushing us away. Though he does not wish, my husband says we must go before the general gets here. Fall 1838 We did not leave when my husband wanted us to go. My sister came to visit us and begged me to come back home and stay with her. She said that even my husband could come, but when we arrived at her large home, my father was there, and he told us that we could not enter and that he only had one daughter. I wanted to cry. My husband, bowed to my father slightly and we left, but before we got too far away, my sister called me back. She was crying as she gave me an old family heirloom that was supposed to have come to me on the day I turned 21. She begged me to leave my husband and those of the Cherokee people and come home to our family, but what she did not understand was that these people had become my people. I could never leave my husband as she wished of me. I loved him far too much. We stayed on in the home land of the Cherokee. But then the...
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...This essay will talk about “We Shall Remain” epoxide 3 which talks about the trails of tears. The Trail of Tears is not a specific place, rather, it is the journey of those Native Americans who were forced from their homelands in the southeastern United States to Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi. To begin with, The Trail of Tears stays for a champion among the most terrible periods ever. It was the begin of destruction of Indian tribe the Cherokee. The Cherokee lived in what transformed into the United States quite a long while preceding the primary European set foot in the New World. Related to the Iroquois, they had moved to the southern Appalachians from the Great Lakes area. Following t American Revolution and the presentation...
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...Tina Stratton ETH/125 Professor Knight September 28, 2014 Historical Report on the Native American The history of the Native American goes as far back as 1492 when Christopher Columbus first came in contact with Native Americans in Bahamas. “The name “indian” was given to them from Christopher Columbus who mistakenly thought he had landed in the “Indies”. (History.com Staff, 2009) How the attitude and image of the Native American people would change with the induction of the early settlers in Virginia in 1607. With the increase in immigration of settlers and the greed of the “white man” to lay claim to Indian lands, violence erupted in their conquest. After the American Revolution, Britain released all of its North American holdings to the United States. The claims of Native Americans were completely eradicated by this action. For a short time, United States regulated under the presumption that the Indians were overthrown, and therefore, had no rights or claims to the land. On May 28, 1830 Congress passes the Indian Removal Act, allowing the president to pursue ownership of all Indian lands east of the Mississippi River. Under this act, the Indians would be paid back with new lands drawn from the public land west of the Mississippi River. President Andrew Jackson was relentless during the 1830s, despite Supreme Court rulings in favor of the Indian Nation, to remove all eastern Indians to land west of the Mississippi River. ...
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...and we call this event the Trail of Tears. As you will soon learn, it is one of the most brutal and racist events to happen in America. The Trail of Tears happened when Hernando De Soto took his adventures to America. After he came to America more and more Europeans came and began to invade on Indian land. The Indians became lost in bewilderment and anger. Some tribes didn’t feel this way until later on, for some helped the new comers win wars during the colonial periods. Often when the Indians’ side lost the war, the Indians would have to give...
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...reservations in hope of gaining education and being able to develop the resources of their lands and provide for their own needs without help from others. Today, there are about 300 federal reservations in the United States largely found west of the Mississippi. There are many environmental issues that have created many tragedies among the American Indians, which have left most of them facing poor living conditions. There is a long history of tragedies among the American Indians starting back in the 1830s. The Trail of Tears, also known as the “death march,” was the first initial tragedy that caught the attention of many historians to this day. The Trail of Tears is known as the enforced relocation and movement of American Indian tribes from southeastern territories of the United States with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 following. This removal included the members of Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw homelands to Indian Territory in eastern parts of the present-day state of Oklahoma. It is said that the term “Trail of Tears” came from the tears of those who experienced the suffering of the marchers, also referring to that the American Indians whom marched in silence. Many American Indians suffered from exposure to starvation and disease during the march to...
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...Trail of Tears California College San Diego HIS220 October 4, 2014 Will Palmer Trail of Tears Long before Amerigo Vespucci and other European explorers reached the New World, Native Americans successfully inhabited the land. There has been much debate as to how many people were here. It has been documented as high as 16 million to as low as under four million (Brinkley, 2008). The Europeans’ relationship with the Native Americans was that of give and take. Both taught each other techniques for cultivating crops, the introduction of domestic livestock and basic survival. The Europeans not only bought with them diseases that killed millions of Native Americans, but also their conviction that their own civilization was greatly superior to that of the natives (Brinkley, 2008). This discussion will include Andrew Jackson’s opinion and policy concerning Native Americans, white Americans’ opinion of Native Americans, the “Five Civilized Tribes,” and the Trail of Tears. Before becoming the President of the United States, Andrew Jackson had already made a name for himself in history. He was a lawyer, politician and judge, wealthy planter and merchant, and in 1801 received the appointment of the commander of the Tennessee militia. During the War of 1812, white settlers near the Spanish owned Florida border were under attack by the Creek Indians. According to Brinkley (2008), on March 27, 1814, in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson and his men retaliated and slaughtered...
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...Adsila: Journal Entry from the Trail of Tears There were ten million Native Americans on this continent when the first non-Indians arrived. Over the next 300 years, 90% of all Native American original population was either wiped out by disease, famine, or warfare imported by the whites. By 1840 all the eastern tribes had been subdued, annihilated or forcibly removed to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi (Cherokee By Blood; Trail of Tears, 2003). My name is Adsila, and this is my story. The year is 1839, but just barely. It is the second week of the New Year and cold here in Kentucky. We were all forced to leave our homelands in North Carolina and travel, mainly by foot, to the state of Oklahoma. Some of the elders, the sick and the young, have been permitted to ride in the wagons. Many have died from sickness, and I fear that most of the rest of us will not make it on the rest of this journey, which is only about half over with now (Cherokee North Carolina; Trail of Tears, 2010). Being that I am young, only 12 summers old, I do not understand why we have been forced to leave the lands of our birth. From things that I have heard the elders say, most of the reason we were forced to leave was because of the yellow rocks. The white man wants these rocks, because these rocks bring them money (Cherokee North Carolina; Trail of Tears, 2010) Money that they spend on our lands! The white man has brought nothing but trouble since they first stepped onto our lands. The...
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...Individual Historical Report on Race Cindy Hackworth Reporting This report is about the American Indians and their plight, even today. Since the early Europeans, the Native Americans have been mistreated and abused by the settlers. The people that were settling in America would come across the natives; they were feared and considered different. The natives were considered savages, and some had even called them animals. The people had come over from Europe, but yet, they wanted the natives off of their own land. The natives had lived in America for thousands of years and had lived in relative peace among each other. The tribes would sometimes have squabbles, but it was usually to get something back or out of revenge sometimes it was even territorial. At the time of the early settlers, there was an estimated population of natives set at 10 million. The settlers decided that because the natives worshipped different God’s then they did, that they were heathens. The settlers decided that they wanted the native’s land for the gold, silver, iron, and land in general. The settlers started a campaign against the natives through the government, and treaties were formed that the natives had to agree upon whether they wanted to or not. The first treaty was in 1778, the government promised to give the natives rights, and benefits, if the natives agreed to give up some of their land. The settlers decided that the land that they had received was not enough for them, and as they moved...
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