The Trail of Tears: Forced Removal and the Death of the Five Tribes

17,000 Cherokee Were Forced to Walk 1,200 Miles in Winter

Between 1830 and 1850, the United States government forcibly removed approximately 60,000 to 100,000 Indigenous people from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States — Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Tennessee — to designated "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi River in what is now Oklahoma. The removals, authorized by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, affected the five nations that Euro-American observers called the "Five Civilized Tribes": the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Seminole. The Cherokee removal of 1838–1839, conducted at bayonet point during a brutal winter, killed an estimated 4,000 of the approximately 17,000 people forced to march — the nation called it Nunahi-Duna-Dlo-Hilu-I, "The Trail Where They Cried." Total deaths across all five nations' removals are estimated at 10,000 to 15,000.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830

The Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, passed the House of Representatives by a margin of only 102 to 97 — indicating far less political consensus than the administration presented. The act authorized the president to negotiate land exchange treaties, offering western lands in exchange for eastern tribal territories. It did not explicitly authorize forced removal; Jackson and his successors implemented it as though it did. The act's primary political constituency was Southern land speculators and cotton planters who coveted the fertile agricultural lands the Five Nations occupied.

• The Cherokee Nation occupied approximately 7 million acres in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina
• Gold was discovered on Cherokee land in Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828 — two years before the act — increasing pressure for removal
• Georgia began passing laws in 1829 that nullified Cherokee law within the state and prohibited Cherokee men from testifying against white men in state courts
• The act appropriated $500,000 to fund the removal process — a sum that proved far insufficient and was supplemented repeatedly

The Five Nations and Their Individual Removals

Worcester v. Georgia and Jackson's Defiance

The Cherokee Nation pursued legal resistance through the federal courts. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct political community with sovereignty over its territory, and that Georgia's laws had no force in that territory. Marshall ruled in favor of missionary Samuel Worcester, who had been imprisoned by Georgia for living in Cherokee territory without a state license. President Jackson reportedly responded: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." The quote's authenticity is disputed by historians, but Jackson's refusal to enforce the ruling is not — he took no action to compel Georgia's compliance.

The Cherokee Removal: 1838–1839

President Martin Van Buren, acting on a fraudulent Treaty of New Echota (1835) signed by a small unauthorized Cherokee faction — not Principal Chief John Ross or the elected government — ordered the Army to begin removal in May 1838. General Winfield Scott commanded approximately 7,000 soldiers who rounded up Cherokee families from their homes at gunpoint, forcing them into stockade camps where disease quickly took hold before the marches west began.

• Approximately 17,000 Cherokee were held in stockade camps during the summer of 1838; dysentery, whooping cough, typhus, and other diseases killed hundreds before the march began
• The main body of the march began in the fall and winter of 1838–1839, with the most severe weather arriving during the crossing of Kentucky, southern Illinois, and Missouri
• Travelers and U.S. Army officers who witnessed the march documented wagon wheels breaking through ice at river crossings, inadequate clothing and rations, and daily deaths
• A Georgia soldier named John G. Burnett later wrote: "Murder is murder whether it's done by men in uniform or men in buckskin."

The New Nation in Indian Territory

The Five Nations reestablished their governments in Indian Territory — present-day eastern Oklahoma — and rebuilt schools, courts, and newspapers within years of arrival. The Cherokee Nation operated one of the highest literacy rates of any population in North America by the 1840s and established the Cherokee Phoenix, published in both English and the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah. In 1887, the Dawes Act divided communally held tribal lands into individual allotments, breaking up the land base further; in 1907, Indian Territory was merged into the new state of Oklahoma, formally dissolving the Five Nations' territorial governments. The Supreme Court's 2020 ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma affirmed that the Creek Nation's original reservation boundaries remain legally intact — a landmark decision with ongoing legal consequences for eastern Oklahoma.