The History Of Tennessee's Summary: The Trail Of Tears

Trail of Tears Tennessee holds a significant amount of history that is meaningful to the south. . The Trail of Tears is a part of Tennessee’s history. “From the time they established formal ties with Great Britain in 1730, the Cherokees had a rocky relationship with whites. They found grounds for dispute over trade practices, territorial control, and the complicated loyalties among the various Indian tribes and European powers”, Rozema had stated in her book, Cherokee Voices. A Englishman had wrote down in his journal as he traveled to North America, “The Cherokee villages were organized into three main town groups-the Overhill Towns in the mountains of Western North Carolina and northeastern Georgia, and the Lower Towns clustered in South

This trip was extremely hard for the ill, the elderly, and young children. In a scholarly journal, “Georgia citizens to seize Cherokee lands; and Andrew Jackson 's 1828 election which guided the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal bill. Though Cherokees deftly used the court system and lobbied Congress vigorously to thwart removal, their efforts were to no avail”. What had made this move harder on Georgia tribes, was that they had started to mine for gold and other precious jewels, but the white men had permission to take away the mining areas. The Cherokee had tried to protest this movement that Jackson had created. The Trail of Tears was the government’s forcible effort to make the Cherokee Indians to leave the land on which they lived on in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The Cherokee people were not prepared for the long and painful journey that awaited them. Most of the tribes had approximately 5 deaths at each camp site that they had. There were captives that had to wait to be removed. Due to all of the crowding, lack of sanitation, and dry weather conditions, the Indians were miserable and many had died due to those waiting conditions. The Cherokee people had begged and pleaded to the government to hold off the removal until fall and if they did so, the Cherokee would voluntarily move. This request was granted, so conditions were a little more bearable. In an article by the U.S. National Park Service, a survivor told his painful story of “his father got sick and died; then his mother; then one by one, his five brothers and sisters. One each day. Then all are gone”. There was a physician on the trail that was there for any medial emergency that may have arose. When the