Qualla: Trail of Tears

Trail of Tears: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Quatie Ross, wife of Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross, died of pneumonia somewhere in southern Illinois in the winter of 1838-39. She had given her only blanket to a sick child along the way. Her body was buried in a roadside grave near Little Rock, Arkansas, where the detachment was forced to keep moving. She was one of an estimated four to eight thousand Cherokee who died in the Trail of Tears - roughly a quarter of the Cherokee Nation - during a forced march that Andrew Jackson's administration ordered and the U.S. Army carried out at bayonet point. The Cherokee called it Nunna daul Tsuny: the trail where they cried. It was not relocation. It was not migration. It was the ethnic cleansing of the American Southeast, conducted by treaty fraud, military occupation, and starvation, in violation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the federal government simply ignored.

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Image: Public domain

Trail of Tears: Five Nations, One Policy

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, Public domain. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by President Andrew Jackson, authorized the federal government to negotiate the removal of Indigenous nations from east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Five nations bore the brunt: the Choctaw removed first, b...

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Image: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided | Public domain

Trail of Tears: A Constitutional Nation

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The Cherokee had done everything America asked of them. Sequoyah's syllabary, completed in 1821, made the Cherokee one of the most literate populations in North America within a decade. The Cherokee Phoenix, founded in 1828, published in both Cherokee and English. The Cherokee Na...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Trail of Tears: The Treaty of New Echota

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Théodore Chassériau, Public domain. Unable to defeat the Cherokee in court, federal negotiators found another path. In December 1835, they signed the Treaty of New Echota with a faction of about one hundred Cherokee who did not represent the nation. Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot signed believing remov...

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Image: Théodore Chassériau | Public domain

Trail of Tears: The Trail

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lmaotru, Public domain. The first detachments were marched west in the heat of summer 1838. Hundreds died of dysentery and exhaustion before the bulk of the nation had even left Tennessee. Chief Ross negotiated for the Cherokee to manage their own removal in the fall, hoping to reduce the death toll. It...

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Image: Lmaotru | Public domain

Trail of Tears: What Survived

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit It'sOnlyMakeBelieve, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Removal did not end these nations. The Cherokee Nation, the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States today, has more than four hundred thousand citizens and is headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians - descendants of those who...

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Image: It'sOnlyMakeBelieve | CC BY-SA 4.0