The Indians were transferred from the forts to detention camps, most of them in Tennessee, to await deportation. At both the forts and camps, living conditions were bleak and diseases rampant, and an unknown number of Cherokees died. The first group of Cherokees departed Tennessee in June and headed to Indian Territory by boat, a journey that took them along the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi and Arkansas rivers.
Heat and extended drought soon made travel along this water route impractical, so that fall and winter thousands more Cherokees were forced to trek from Tennessee to present-day Oklahoma via one of several overland routes.
Federal officials allowed Chief John Ross to take charge of these overland removals, and he organized the Indians into 13 groups, each comprised of nearly a thousand people. Although there were some wagons and horses, most people had to walk. The route followed by the largest number of Cherokees—12, people or more, according to some estimates—was the northern route, a distance of more than miles through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and into Indian Territory.
The last groups of Cherokees made it to Indian Territory in March A century later, Route 66, the iconic highway established in , overlapped with part of this route, from Rolla to Springfield, Missouri.
A small group of Cherokee people managed to remain in North Carolina, either as a result of an agreement that enabled them to stay on their land there, or because they hid in the mountains from the U. The group, which also included people who walked back from Indian Territory, became known as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Today, the group has approximately 12, members, who live primarily in western North Carolina on the 57,acre Qualla Boundary.
In the Georgia legislature annexed Cherokee territory. The Cherokee resisted, using American courts to argue that they were a sovereign nation. The U. Supreme Court agreed in Worcester v. Acting under the Indian Removal Act of , the U. An unauthorized Cherokee faction signed the Treaty of New Echota in , which exchanged Cherokee lands in the east for land in Indian Territory and money to help them with relocation.
Most Cherokees refused to move, and in May of federal troops began to round up the Cherokees and imprison them in stockades to await removal. Many died in the stockades as they waited. Most made the journey on foot. Rebecca Neugin, who was a child when she and her family were forced to remove, stated that although she and her smaller siblings were able to ride in a wagon, her mother, father, and older brother walked all the way.
The Cherokee nation was not the only Native American culture to be removed westward in the 19th century. Perhaps as many as , First Peoples were pushed out of their traditional lands, and the death toll from these forced removals reached far into the thousands.
Tribal peoples were stripped of all their possessions and taken to collection points like Fort Hembree in North Carolina, where they would wait in squalid conditions, many dying from dysentery even before the punishing westward trek began.
Smithers says that the popular notion of the Trail of Tears being a forced march on foot isn't entirely accurate. About half of the forcibly removed native peoples were shipped out on flatbed barges that followed a twisting river route out West.
For the overland routes, most traveled in ox-drawn wagons. But that doesn't mean that the journey was any less traumatic or deadly. Food was scarce and disease ran rampant on the overland routes as well, which proceeded in spite of lethal cold or searing heat for more than 1, miles 1, kilometers.
In some cases, men were marched in double-file lines with shackles on their feet and hands. A Choctaw leader described the experience to an Alabama newspaper as a "trail of tears and death. The final death toll of the Trail of Tears is impossible to verify, says Smithers, he notes that contemporary historians believe that between 4, and 8, Cherokee perished during the forced removals in and , as well as 4, Choctaw a third of the entire tribe and 3, Creek Indians.
Smithers says that the traumatic legacy of the Trail of Tears still reverberates within tribal communities. Tragically, it wouldn't be the last time that the U. Despite promises that the tribes would be left alone after this forced removal, white settlers continued pushing against "Indian Territory," which eventually became Oklahoma.
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