50 Fun Facts About Trail of Tears

Which Tennessee congressman lost his seat after voting against the Indian Removal Act in 1830?

Davy Crockett was the only member of Tennessee's delegation to vote no, and the Cherokee principal chief wrote to thank him. Voters back home were less grateful and turned him out in 1831.

In 1847 a nation driven west on the Trail of Tears sent $170 in famine relief to which country?

Ireland remembers the gift with Kindred Spirits, a ring of nine steel eagle feathers in a County Cork park. The donors had been uprooted themselves only sixteen years earlier.

Which president signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and made removal his top legislative priority?

Andrew Jackson and his successor used the law to push more than 60,000 people from at least 18 tribes off their homelands.

Which country star played a Cherokee chief in a 1970 public television drama, Trail of Tears?

Johnny Cash had already devoted a whole 1964 album, Bitter Tears, to the mistreatment of Native Americans by the government.

What find near Dahlonega, Georgia, sent thousands of miners onto Cherokee land before removal?

Gold set off the second big rush of its kind in the United States, and the flood of miners onto Cherokee land became known as the Great Intrusion.

The Trail of Tears ended in Indian Territory, in what is now which US state?

Oklahoma was created by a 1906 act that merged Indian Territory with a neighbouring territory, ending the removed nations' separate domain.

Which nation resisted removal from Florida in the longest and costliest of America's Indian wars?

Seminole fighters held out from 1835 to 1842, and a few hundred were never removed from Florida at all.

Which silversmith's syllabary, completed in 1821, let the Cherokee write their own language?

Sequoyah could not read any other language when he began, and the Cherokee Nation officially adopted his script in 1825.

In the Remember the Removal event, young Cherokee retrace 950 miles of the removal route, travelling how?

By bicycle, the riders average about 60 miles a day, setting out from the old Cherokee capital in Georgia.

Which principal chief led Cherokee resistance to removal and lost his wife on the Trail of Tears?

John Ross was elected in 1828 and held the office until his death in 1866, longer than anyone else.

Which nation, signers of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, became the first removed under the 1830 act?

Choctaw families began leaving in 1831, and their removal became the model for every one that followed. A remark by one of their chiefs along the way gave the Trail of Tears its name.

The Indian Removal Act offered eastern nations new land on the far side of which river?

Mississippi was the dividing line named in the law's own title, and by 1837 some 46,000 people had been moved across it.

Demand for land to grow which booming crop drove the push to remove the Southeastern nations?

Cotton spread fast across the upland South after Eli Whitney's gin, and planters wanted tribal land for new fields worked by enslaved people.

Which US Army general was placed in command of rounding up the Cherokee for removal in 1838?

Winfield Scott later let the Cherokee council run the rest of the journey itself, a contract that angered many Southerners.

Which Chief Justice called the Cherokee a domestic dependent nation and declined to hear their 1831 case?

John Marshall compared the tribes' tie to the United States to that of a ward to its guardian. A year later he sided with the Cherokee in a second case.

Which 1835 agreement, signed by a minority faction, became the legal basis for removing the Cherokee?

The Treaty of New Echota was never approved by the Cherokee council, and some 16,000 Cherokee signed a petition against it. The Senate ratified it anyway in 1836.

Which town did the Cherokee make their capital in Indian Territory in 1839, after the Trail of Tears?

Tahlequah replaced an older western capital, Tahlonteeskee, when the new arrivals flooded in, and two federally recognized Cherokee tribes have their capital there.

The Eastern Band, descended from Cherokee who escaped removal, is based in the mountains of which state?

North Carolina was home to about 800 Cherokee along the remote Oconaluftee River who were never marched west, and their descendants have their headquarters beside the Great Smoky Mountains.

Into which vast Florida wetland did a few hundred holdouts retreat rather than be removed west?

The Everglades sheltered them so well that the government gave up the chase, and their descendants say they never signed a peace treaty.

Which Florida war leader, seized under a flag of truce in 1837, became the face of resistance to removal?

Osceola had come for peace talks when he was taken, and he died a few months later in an army fort at Charleston.

Which 1832 Supreme Court case, brought by a jailed missionary, barred state law from Cherokee land?

Worcester v. Georgia did not free the missionary at once: the state refused to release him and kept him in prison until January 1833, ten months after the ruling.

Which Cherokee leader reportedly said he had signed his death warrant on signing the 1835 removal treaty?

Major Ridge was shot from ambush in June 1839 by Cherokee who held him to an old law that made giving up tribal land a capital crime.

Which first editor of the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper came to back removal and signed the 1835 treaty?

Elias Boudinot was born Gallegina; as a student he asked a former president of the Continental Congress for permission to use his name, and got it.

Which Treaty Party leader escaped the 1839 killings and became the last Confederate general to surrender?

Stand Watie was the only Native American to reach general's rank in the Confederate army, and he did not sign a cease-fire until June 23, 1865.

In Cherokee tradition, who surrendered for execution in 1838 so fugitives in the Smokies could stay?

In the best-known telling, Tsali and his sons had killed two soldiers after his wife was whipped during the roundup. The army's offer reached the fugitives through a white lawyer the tribe had adopted.

Which French traveller watched removed families cross the river at Memphis in 1831?

Alexis de Tocqueville had been sent to study American prisons; the same journey produced his best-known book four years later.

Which New England essayist wrote to President Van Buren in 1838 urging him to halt Cherokee removal?

Ralph Waldo Emerson called the removal treaty a sham in his open letter, sent a month before the deadline for the Cherokee to leave.

Which nation paid $530,000 for part of a neighbour's western land before its own removal in 1837?

Chickasaw leaders reached the deal after five years of bitter debate, and their people gathered at Memphis on July 4, 1837, with their belongings and livestock.

On reaching which Arkansas city in 1831 did a chief call his people's journey a trail of tears and death?

Little Rock's newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, carried the chief's words, and the phrase came to mean all the removals.

By what collective label were the Cherokee and the other removed Southeastern nations long known?

Five Civilized Tribes was a label white Americans applied because these nations had adopted Christianity, literacy and centralized governments. None of it spared them removal.

The Monmouth, whose 1837 collision killed about 311 Creek being removed west, was what kind of vessel?

Steamboat crews hired by the army packed some 700 people aboard the Monmouth, which strayed into another vessel's path on a drizzly night.

In 1827, eleven years before removal, the Cherokee Nation adopted which hallmark of a modern republic?

A written constitution gave the Cherokee a government of three branches, legislative, executive and judicial, a decade before they were driven out.

Which Tennessee city grew from a Cherokee river landing that became a departure depot for the removal?

Chattanooga got its present name only after the Cherokee were gone, when newcomers renamed the landing a Cherokee trader had founded in 1816.

Which nation was marched to Bosque Redondo in 1864 in a later forced removal known as the Long Walk?

Navajo families were allowed to return to their homeland under an 1868 treaty, four years after the marches began.

Where were Cherokee families held through the summer of 1838 before the journey west began?

Internment camps packed hundreds of people together through a summer of heat and drought, and disease killed many before the journey west had begun.

From which state were some 15,000 Creek driven in 1836, the last of their homeland in the East?

Alabama had abolished the Creek government and stood by while speculators cheated families out of their allotments. About 3,500 of those removed did not survive the journey.

Which outdoor drama about the Cherokee removal opened in the Smoky Mountains in 1950?

Unto These Hills has sold more than five million tickets since it opened at a 2,800-seat mountainside theatre.

By what method did Georgia hand out seized Cherokee land to its white citizens in 1832?

A lottery let citizens register for a chance to win lots taken from the Cherokee and the Creek, and no other state ran such draws on Georgia's scale.

What did the Georgia Guard seize in 1835 to stop the Cherokee Phoenix from publishing?

Its printing press used type specially cast for the Cherokee script, arranged by a missionary, and the paper was not revived until the 20th century.

Cherokee warriors helped a future president win which 1814 battle against the Red Stick Creek?

Horseshoe Bend was won with the help of about 500 Cherokee allies, and the general they fought under later forced their nation west.

Which nation was marched from Indiana to Kansas in 1838 on what became known as the Trail of Death?

Potawatomi families covered about 660 miles in 61 days after their chief refused to sign away his reserve, and more than 40 people died, most of them children.

What name was given to the Cherokee who had moved west voluntarily, years before the forced removal?

Old Settlers, also called the Western Cherokee, already had a government and a capital of their own when the exiles arrived.

Which Tennessee council ground served as the last Cherokee capital in the East, from 1832 to 1838?

Red Clay hosted eleven general councils, each drawing 4,000 to 5,000 Cherokee, after Georgia barred them from holding public meetings on its soil.

Which Cherokee warrior, credited with saving a future president in 1814, later walked home from exile?

Junaluska reportedly came to regret the rescue. Years after being marched west he returned on foot, and his home state granted him citizenship and land.

Which educator led a women's petition campaign to Congress against the Indian Removal Bill in 1829?

Catharine Beecher's circular, dated Christmas Day 1829, urged women across the country to send petitions to Congress. The bill became law the following May all the same.

Which Home, Sweet Home songwriter was jailed by the Georgia Guard with the Cherokee principal chief?

John Howard Payne was the chief's house guest, in the South to interview Cherokee elders, and the authorities found his visit suspicious.

Which white lawyer, adopted by a Cherokee chief, owned the mountain land that let some Cherokee stay?

William H. Thomas held the land in his own name, and families living on private property were not subject to removal. He later led a Confederate legion of Cherokee soldiers.

What service, normally twelve cents, cost the Cherokee a dollar a head on the Ohio River in 1838?

A ferry ride was sold to them only after every other customer had been served, and many died sheltering under an overhanging bluff while they waited.

Which epidemic struck removal parties heading west in 1832, soon after a devastating winter blizzard?

Cholera hit the second of three migrations made between 1831 and 1833, and about 2,500 people died across all three.

From which country did the United States acquire Florida in 1821, before pressing its tribes to move west?

Spain gave up Florida under the Adams–Onís Treaty, and within eleven years the territory's Native people were being told to leave for the West.