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, between 1831 and 1833, with roughly a quarter of their people dying along the way. The Muscogee (Creek) were forced out in 1836, many in chains. The Chickasaw left in 1837. The Seminole resisted in three brutal wars; those who could not escape into the Florida swamps were removed by 1842. And the Cherokee - whose removal became the most documented, the most contested, and the symbol of the whole catastrophe - were driven west in 1838 and 1839. Approximately sixty thousand Indigenous people were forced from their homes. The land they left became cotton plantations, gold mines, and the future Confederacy.

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 Nation adopted a written constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution. They farmed, built mills, established schools, and conducted treaties as a sovereign nation. When Georgia tried to seize their land after gold was discovered there in 1828, the Cherokee did not raise an army. They sued. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Cherokee territory was a 'distinct community' in which Georgia law had no force. Andrew Jackson is said to have responded: 'John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.' He refused to. The court ruling was simply ignored.

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 removal was inevitable and that a treaty might at least secure better terms. Chief John Ross and roughly sixteen thousand Cherokee rejected it; Ross delivered a petition to Congress signed by nearly the entire nation opposing the treaty. The Senate ratified it anyway, by a single vote, in 1836. The Cherokee were given two years to leave. Most refused, hoping the fraud would be reversed. In May 1838, seven thousand federal troops under General Winfield Scott began rounding them up at gunpoint - dragging families from dinner tables, from fields, from churches - and locking them in stockades through a typhus-ridden summer.

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 did not. Thirteen detachments of roughly a thousand people each set out between August 1838 and March 1839, traveling overland and by river across nine modern states. Winter was the worst in living memory. The Mississippi froze, stranding wagons. Blankets were insufficient. Rations were stolen by contractors. The elderly, infants, and pregnant women died first; the strong died next. Quatie Ross was one of them. So was the infant son of Reverend Jesse Bushyhead. Estimates of the dead range from four thousand to as many as eight thousand. The federal government did not keep a complete count.

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 hid in the Smoky Mountains or held individual land grants - remain in western North Carolina, where they had always lived. The Muscogee Nation, the Choctaw Nation, the Chickasaw Nation, and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma all govern their territories today; the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision in 2020 affirmed that much of eastern Oklahoma legally remains the reservations established for them after Removal. The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, designated in 1987, traces the routes across nine states. The point of visiting it is not to mourn a vanished people. It is to recognize that the people the United States tried to erase are still here, still sovereign, and still speaking their own languages.