Trail of Tears
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Trail of Tears trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In the 1830s the United States forced tens of thousands of Native Americans out of the Southeast and onto a journey of roughly a thousand miles. The Cherokee, who had their own newspaper, courts and elected council, fought the policy in Congress and before the highest court in the land, and won an important ruling. They were removed anyway. Thousands died in stockades and on the road, and the story still shapes how Americans think about treaties, law and justice. This quiz covers the ground a student or history fan would expect: the law that started it, the presidents and generals who carried it out, the chiefs who resisted and the faction that signed, the court rulings, the routes and the rivers, and the other nations who were driven west before the Cherokee. It also follows the story forward, to the communities that stayed behind, the memorials, and the ways the removal is remembered. The early questions suit a middle school class meeting the topic for the first time, and the later ones reward readers who know the period well. Every question is multiple choice and comes with a short explanation, so it works for a classroom review, a homeschool unit or a quiet test of your own knowledge.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Tennessee congressman lost his seat after voting against the Indian Removal Act in 1830?
Davy Crockett
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.
Q 02In 1847 a nation driven west on the Trail of Tears sent $170 in famine relief to which country?
Ireland
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.
Q 03Which president signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and made removal his top legislative priority?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson and his successor used the law to push more than 60,000 people from at least 18 tribes off their homelands.
Q 04Which country star played a Cherokee chief in a 1970 public television drama, Trail of Tears?
Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash had already devoted a whole 1964 album, Bitter Tears, to the mistreatment of Native Americans by the government.
Q 05What find near Dahlonega, Georgia, sent thousands of miners onto Cherokee land before removal?
Gold
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.
Q 06The Trail of Tears ended in Indian Territory, in what is now which US state?
Oklahoma
Oklahoma was created by a 1906 act that merged Indian Territory with a neighbouring territory, ending the removed nations' separate domain.
Q 07Which nation resisted removal from Florida in the longest and costliest of America's Indian wars?
Seminole
Seminole fighters held out from 1835 to 1842, and a few hundred were never removed from Florida at all.
Q 08Which silversmith's syllabary, completed in 1821, let the Cherokee write their own language?
Sequoyah
Sequoyah could not read any other language when he began, and the Cherokee Nation officially adopted his script in 1825.
Q 09In the Remember the Removal event, young Cherokee retrace 950 miles of the removal route, travelling how?
By bicycle
By bicycle, the riders average about 60 miles a day, setting out from the old Cherokee capital in Georgia.
Q 10Which principal chief led Cherokee resistance to removal and lost his wife on the Trail of Tears?
John Ross
John Ross was elected in 1828 and held the office until his death in 1866, longer than anyone else.
Q 11Which nation, signers of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, became the first removed under the 1830 act?
Choctaw
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.
Q 12The Indian Removal Act offered eastern nations new land on the far side of which river?
Mississippi
Mississippi was the dividing line named in the law's own title, and by 1837 some 46,000 people had been moved across it.
Q 13Demand for land to grow which booming crop drove the push to remove the Southeastern nations?
Cotton
Cotton spread fast across the upland South after Eli Whitney's gin, and planters wanted tribal land for new fields worked by enslaved people.
Q 21Which 1832 Supreme Court case, brought by a jailed missionary, barred state law from Cherokee land?
Worcester v. Georgia
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.
Q 22Which Cherokee leader reportedly said he had signed his death warrant on signing the 1835 removal treaty?
Major Ridge
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.
Q 23Which first editor of the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper came to back removal and signed the 1835 treaty?
Elias Boudinot
Q 14Which US Army general was placed in command of rounding up the Cherokee for removal in 1838?
Winfield Scott
Winfield Scott later let the Cherokee council run the rest of the journey itself, a contract that angered many Southerners.
Q 15Which Chief Justice called the Cherokee a domestic dependent nation and declined to hear their 1831 case?
John Marshall
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.
Q 16Which 1835 agreement, signed by a minority faction, became the legal basis for removing the Cherokee?
Treaty of New Echota
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.
Q 17Which town did the Cherokee make their capital in Indian Territory in 1839, after the Trail of Tears?
Tahlequah
Tahlequah replaced an older western capital, Tahlonteeskee, when the new arrivals flooded in, and two federally recognized Cherokee tribes have their capital there.
Q 18The Eastern Band, descended from Cherokee who escaped removal, is based in the mountains of which state?
North Carolina
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.
Q 19Into which vast Florida wetland did a few hundred holdouts retreat rather than be removed west?
Everglades
The Everglades sheltered them so well that the government gave up the chase, and their descendants say they never signed a peace treaty.
Q 20Which Florida war leader, seized under a flag of truce in 1837, became the face of resistance to removal?
Osceola
Osceola had come for peace talks when he was taken, and he died a few months later in an army fort at Charleston.
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.
Q 24Which Treaty Party leader escaped the 1839 killings and became the last Confederate general to surrender?
Stand Watie
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.
Q 25In Cherokee tradition, who surrendered for execution in 1838 so fugitives in the Smokies could stay?
Tsali
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.
Q 26Which French traveller watched removed families cross the river at Memphis in 1831?
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville had been sent to study American prisons; the same journey produced his best-known book four years later.
Q 27Which New England essayist wrote to President Van Buren in 1838 urging him to halt Cherokee removal?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson called the removal treaty a sham in his open letter, sent a month before the deadline for the Cherokee to leave.
Q 28Which nation paid $530,000 for part of a neighbour's western land before its own removal in 1837?
Chickasaw
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.
Q 29On reaching which Arkansas city in 1831 did a chief call his people's journey a trail of tears and death?
Little Rock
Little Rock's newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, carried the chief's words, and the phrase came to mean all the removals.
Q 30By what collective label were the Cherokee and the other removed Southeastern nations long known?
Five Civilized Tribes
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.