The TRAIL OF TEARS
At the beginning of the 1830's, nearly 120,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida, land their ancestors had lived on for generations. By the early 1940's, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Any native American who was still there had to work for white settlers who had taken their land. The federal government forced the rest of them to leave their homeland and walk thousands of miles to a designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and deadly journey is known as the Trail of Tears or the Indian Removal Act.
What exactly is the trail of tears?The Trail of Tears was the forced movement of the Native American Nations from the southern eastern parts of the United States to the middle part of the United States where present day Oklahoma and Kansas is. The bill to pass this movement was called the Indian Removal Act and was passed in the 1830's. The removal included many members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations. Many were relocated to present day Oklahoma and Kansas.
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“People of today do not know that we are living on land that was taken from a helpless race, to satisfy the white men’s greed... murder is murder and somebody must answer, somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country..somebody must explain the four thousand silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile.”
-John G. Burnett Consequences of the trail of tearsThe native Americans had to walk across distances over 1,000 miles. Many of them died because of this. An estimated 120,000 Natives were forced to make the journey and about a quarter of them died from either hunger, exposure, or disease.
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