ERIN WHITSON: But we're talking genocide here.

And pretty graphic depictions of children and older folks dying along the trail or being victimized by American representatives or troops or things like that-- American settlers.

It's really horrific sorts of things that we don't really put a human face on.

And I think that that's an important thing that we should do.

[music playing] [tractor engine putting] [bird shrieking] [train whistle blows] While exploring the Ozarks, you may find trails and signs denoting crossing sites of the Trail of Tears.

The complexity and significance of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 led to the forced relocation of thousands of Indigenous people from the Southeast to territory which later became Oklahoma.

And along their difficult journey, many passed through the Ozarks area.

On today's show, Erin Whitson with the Missouri Humanities Council shares with us the details of the Trail of Tears and where you can find these paths and learn more about their significance to our shared history.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Well, thanks for joining me today.

I think we're going to have a very interesting show.

And before we get started and talk about the Trail of Tears and all that, why don't you give a little bit of your background and how you got involved in archaeology and all that.

I can do that.

So my name is Erin Whitson.

I went to undergrad in St. Charles at Lindenwood University.

My undergraduate degree was in history.

My mom's a history teacher.

So from way back, I've been interested in history.

But I kind of knew that I didn't really want to teach.

It's fun for a while, but I like the hands-on stuff.

So I got interested in archaeology probably midway through my undergraduate degree and got into Illinois State University, where I got my master's in historical archaeology.

And then from there, I went to upstate New York to SUNY Binghamton University where I've been working on my PhD for the last little while.

And my PhD will focus on Trail of Tears as well where it'll be the first project, I think, to really focus on what encampments look like all along the Trail of Tears, because no one really knows what those look like.

So we'll be investigating that.

I'm also a full-time employee for Missouri Humanities.

And Missouri Humanities has an initiative right now looking at Cherokee removal through the State of Missouri.

We have over 600 miles of the Trail here through Missouri.

We have more miles than any other state.

But we're also one of the states that have the least well-known about this journey through our state in 1837 to 1839.

Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more about that in detail, because I know it goes through Springfield and-- because every once in a while, I'll come across a sign that says Trail of Tears and everything.

ERIN WHITSON: Yeah.

What really gets you interested in the Trail of Tears?

So I think it's one of those things-- what interests me is that it's one of those events in our past that everyone kind of knows about, but we don't really know about it.

We've got journal articles from the time.

We've only got two of the 13 or so groups represented.

So we don't really know much about what's going on when they were moving across our state.

It's interesting to me that we're essentially talking about ethnic cleansing.

And we don't ever think about American interaction with the tribes in those terms.

But we're talking genocide here, and pretty graphic depictions of children and older folks dying along the trail or being victimized by American representatives or troops or things like that-- American settlers.

It's really horrific sorts of things that we don't really put a human face on.

And I think that that's an important thing that we should do to understand this.

I guess probably the most conception of the Trail of Tears-- this is my conception, so you can correct me on multiple levels.

But normally, when you think of the Trail of Tears, you think about the Cherokee Nation.

At least I do.

And I think about North Carolina and the trails that come.

And then, ultimately, that relocation, and then, ultimately, you end up in Oklahoma.

I mean, that's in-- think in terms of a single trail.

Yeah, JIM BAKER: But really, it's a lot more complicated than that.

Let's talk a little bit about how that all works.

Normally, in the southeastern part of the country-- this thing started in North Carolina, primarily?

So it starts in a couple of different places in the Southeast.

So the Cherokee were not the only ones removed.

So to begin with, we should talk about that.

JIM BAKER: Yeah, that's another thing I was going to ask you about later, because there's more nations involved than just Cherokee, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, there are many paths that that got over from Tennessee, North Carolina, that area through to Missouri-- or through to Oklahoma.

There are three trails through the state of Missouri just by itself.

When they were coming across, most of them primarily took what we call the Northern route, which is up sort of towards Rolla and then down 44 Corridor, down through to Springfield, and then down further to Arkansas and then over.

There was one that took a more southernly route, the Hildebrand Route went across, sort of parallel, to this northern route.

But it was a little lower.

And then they merged back up before they hit Springfield and then went through on the same path that the other group had taken.

And then the Benge route cuts across the boot heel into Arkansas, then they cut across the top of Arkansas trying to get West.

There were a few other groups that also went by water, which completely avoided Missouri entirely, those routes did.

But by and large, the majority of the Cherokee who came through the state of Missouri went through the northern route.

I think we had 11 of the 13 detachments came through that direction.

Yeah, that was one thing I was going to ask you.

So this happened in, what, 1830, 1850?

There's a several year period.

But I always kind of had the conception that it was just one big group moving.

But that's not the way it was, right?

Yeah, I mean, if you think about this from a logistics point of view, how do you get an entire population-- we're talking 1,600 people-- from one part of the United States clear across half a continent, you know, the middle point.

JIM BAKER: Yeah, without a lot of modern transportation.

Yeah, I mean, we're talking 1837 for the Cherokee-- 1837 through 1839.

So we've got three years.

And they made this enormous push for that many people in the course of three years.

So they sent different groups of detachments, is what they were called.

And each detachment had, usually, about 1,000 people, with the exception of the first one, Cannon's detachment.

They were the only ones that also had military escort.

They were the test case to see if they could get across.

They, for the most part, had more voluntary folks, people who'd been removed who had said, OK, yeah, we can see where this is heading.

We'll get out quicker so that we can prepare and we can go.

And so that group had about 300 people.

And then, after that, all of the groups but the last one had about 1,000.

And the last one had about 2,000 people.

So if you're trying to think about how many families that is-- how many campfires are you going to have every night, how many wagons are you going to have per group, how many horses are you going to have.

I mean, these people are relocating and bringing their whole lives with them.

So how many cows do you have to get back to farming when you get there?

How many pigs, how many dogs, geese, things like that.

It was an enormous endeavor.

And they did it.

And that was miraculous.

But a fourth of their population died between the two places, which it's horrific.

One in four people died.

It's just staggering to think about it in those terms.

And if you think about it further, most of those people were either children-- very young, or the very old.

And if you're trying to, as a people, trying to make sure that the next generation hangs onto those cultural things that you've been clutching to for so long, for so many years, once white folks have been engaging with them and trying to push that stuff out, the children are the ones you're going to teach it to.

And if that generation is gone or severely hurt, then it's going to be harder to do that.

And the older folks are the ones who are going to have a lot to say about passing those things on.

They have the best memories for some of those cultural traditions.

And so this took a huge hit.

Or their cultural transmission, I guess, took a huge hit because of this, this incident.

When this all started, what did the Cherokee Nation look like in North Carolina, in the Southeast.

What did it look like at that point?

And we'll kind of work our way through all that.

So people have unkindly termed one of the civilized tribes.

Right.

They met and began engaging with Europeans for a long while, before this happened.

And probably, I think, DeSoto was the first one who'd come through and they'd engaged with him fairly early.

So they've had a long history here, of engaging with Europeans.

Which means they've also had a long history of trying to make it work and figuring out ways to make it work and come out ahead.

And so for a while there, they had adopted things in a way that made sense to them, culturally, they were able to hang on to some of those things.

But they were able to do it in a way that kind of put them ahead in some ways.

So they had plantations and they had had slavery prior to Europeans coming to the continent.

But they also adopted African slavery as well.

So they're engaging in this world in some kind of interesting ways.

But they're doing it in ways that kind of put them on top of the food chain down there.

Because they have a lot of territory that they had owned for generations, for millennia.

They knew the land, they knew what it could support, they knew how to farm, they knew all these sorts of things.

And so they were kind of quick to adopt those new things.

Which meant that there are some really rich landowners down there.

They had plantations that rivaled some of the plantations we think about in the antebellum period.

They we're operating in ways, very similar to their white counterparts, in a lot of Cherokee territory.

There were some who are still doing a lot of those more traditional things, back in the hills.

Those tended to be the poorer people.

And a lot of those people didn't speak English, but for the most part, this was one of the most well-read, most literate populations in the United States at the time, including some of their white neighbors, which is kind of remarkable.

They were operating in all the ways that their white neighbors told them that they should have.

And then their white counterparts found gold in Georgia.

Yeah, I think there's probably a misconception that this is kind of like a group of people on a reservation, or whatever, that's being moved.

But they actually had a lifestyle that had been well established and had been there for a long time.

Yeah, for thousands of years, probably.

Thousands of years.

Yeah So I guess I always think that probably, generally, most things are done because someone wants some land.

You know, I've looked at a lot of Indigenous peoples around the world, by the way, and there's always, they have something of value, but they can't defend it.

And that's kind of like the commonality that occurs in these kind of things.

I assume that that was the case in this one, or is there something else there?

They had gold and they had land.

They could defend it, though, and they did, because they were so well educated and they were so adaptable.

They'd been operating in this system that was more like the United States government, than a lot of other tribes.

So when gold was found in Georgia and when the United States government and Georgia and Alabama and those states wanted to kick them out of the Southeast, they took it to the Supreme Court.

They took it and fought it in the ways that are supposed to be used to protect individual rights.

At the time they weren't seen as citizens of the United States, so they had proxies, they use missionaries in this lawsuit.

But they won their case in the Supreme Court, they fought successfully and argued that they had a right to be here and the United States government and the states had no rights to kick them out and were essentially told where's your army, how are you going to support this.

Because the Supreme Court doesn't have a way, they don't have troops or anything to support their judgments here.

So they didn't have much.

So they won the legal battle, but not the rest of it, in a sense.

And that's where I understand where a lot of these groups just don't have the power base to protect themselves, or to stop something like this from happening.

So were they considered, was there like tribal right?

Were there any Federal Reserve treaties between the Cherokees and the federal government to that point?

There had been several, yeah.

That's kind of what made this kind of difficult.

There were treaties between the Cherokee and different states, there were treaties between the Cherokee and the United States.

The United States, we hadn't fought our Civil War yet, so we hadn't really come to the idea that like, the federal government was in charge of everything and states had to defer to them.

It was sort of still the states' right sort of thing.

JIM BAKER: Right So Jackson sort of backed out, going, well I can't do anything, because states' rights.

And that gave Alabama and Georgia and those states down there the right to tell them they had to get out.

So it really was the states that were pushing for them to leave, with the federal government being passive, I guess, is that the way to characterize it?

Yeah that's the way to characterize it.

So what was the typical, I kind of got a kick out of calling it Cherokee relocation, that makes it sound a lot nicer.

But was that a formal government program, from the federal government, the Cherokee relocation.

It was.

So the federal government, at some point, just said, look, this is going to happen.

You need to get out, so we need to have a plan for you getting out.

So they fought it tooth and nail, as long as they could.

And then their Chief Ross, John Ross, eventually came to terms with the fact that this was going to happen.

They had been rounded up at Bayonet Point, in some cases, in all of these states in the south.

And they'd been put in depots, which are a fancy name for concentration camp, they're holding pens for these people.

And they'd been sitting there for a year, I think or so.

And they were told we need to get you out, we need a plan, and you need to get out by X date.

And they had intended to out by that summer, I think, of '38, it was really when they were pushing.

But the weather wasn't cooperating.

There was a drought that made it difficult for them to cross some of the low water points, down probably more along Chattanooga area, it made it difficult, because they couldn't cross, the water was so low that they couldn't ferry these people across.

And all of their wagons and all of their goods and livestock and all those things.

So they were kind of stuck until the water rose again.

The water didn't rise again until October.

So they got started really late and the states told them that they were not allowed to stall anymore, that they were going to get out.

Or else they would be pushed out by force.

So they started sending these groups out, some of them are days between one another, when they left.

And I think they've got them all out within three or four months.

So you can imagine how muddy these roads are, you can imagine-- How many people were involved at that point?

I've seen some different numbers, sometimes you see 60,000, sometimes you see 100,000.

I guess it depends on if you're counting other Indian nations.

Yeah, so the Cherokee Nation had about 1,600, I think, about that time.

Which is a lot of people to relocate west.

So when they actually formed the detachment to say, OK you're going to start moving.

What did those look like?

Was it some covered wagon, some people walking, some people on horseback?

How did that all operate?

That's a good question, that's part of what my job, is trying to figure that out.

We know that most people probably walked.

If they had horses, they were allowed to take those.

A lot of the super old or the tiny children could get in the wagons, but for the most part, everyone was walking.

It wasn't a comfortable ordeal and a lot of these people, they'd been rounded up in the summertime from their homes, by these troops that were state troops, they were state militias a lot of times.

Rounded up without letting them first pack or get real prepared, so these people are starting off on this journey in October with summer clothes, some of them don't have shoes.

They were allowed, so I think the Federal government maybe brought in tents for them, to use as camping.

But those are cloth, they wear out fairly quick if you're not careful.

And by the time they hit Missouri, which is about the halfway point, things start getting bad.

That's about the point when things start wearing out, people start getting really sick.

The groups have generally had to slow down, because people are getting really sick.

Like not just one or two, but we're talking huge portions of this group.

Because any time you get that many people together in these small spaces, people start getting communicable diseases like dysentery or cholera and they have to stop and make makeshift hospital situations.

So I don't want to forget to ask one question.

Why Oklahoma was selected to be the destination?

I mean you know, somebody threw a dart and say, oh, this is where it goes?

Or how did it work?

So the United States government had sent people to Oklahoma, other groups to Oklahoma, before the Cherokee had been shipped that direction.

The Osage, who are native to most of Missouri, they had been shipped out or they'd been sent West in the early 1800s, 1809 to 1825 area, there were two treaties there that pushed them west.

I think the Choctaw went before the Cherokee, so they'd been pushed out in 1832.

Oklahoma was a good area, because it was past the area where Americans had really moved, right?

I mean, there had been some explorers and traders and things like that who'd gone west into the Rockies, before this point.

But for the most part, the United States government hadn't claimed that area, it was just designated Indian territory and left like that on the map, for a good long while.

Until after, I want to say it was definitely after the Civil War.

But Cherokee got pushed in there, there are four other tribes in the Southeast that got pushed to Oklahoma, as well.

And then there were a bunch of others who, from the Northeast, from all the states in between.

How did the tribes co-exist in that space?

Because I can see a lot of tensions and some problems, because they are different nations.

Yeah, they are different nations and some of them had been not necessarily on friendly terms, prior to this.

I mean, so the Cherokee were actively preparing to leave when they were also being asked to help negotiate tensions between the United States government and the Seminole, at the time.

Because they had the Seminole wars and stuff.

So you know, I'm sure things were a little tense with that, because the Seminole probably weren't super fond of that little thing.

The Cherokee had fought against some of the Creek, in the Creek wars that had happened.

Things weren't comfortable, necessarily, there have been groups of Cherokee that had been pushed out, prior to 1830s.

There was another group that had been living in Missouri, southern Missouri, for a while before.

And then they had had some issues with Osage, and these people were coming into the territory that the United States government had given the Osage.

And then had parsed out a little bit, to go to the Cherokee, too, which made things more tense, I'm sure.

So I mean, it's creating tensions where there had already been tensions.

And when the Cherokee got there, there wasn't necessarily widespread intertribal issues.

But remember that the Cherokee had been sent and this treaty that pushed the Cherokee west, that finally sealed the deal, it was signed in part by a few Cherokee people who decided this was what's best for everyone, listen to me, I know what's best.

And there were some really bad feelings about that, understandably.

You know 1/4 of their population had died within three years time, because these people, who were not elected by the tribe to lead the tribe, as the chief or anything like that, they had decided that this was what's best for everyone.

And so when they got there, the Cherokee, it's almost like a mini Civil War, or something like that.

There was a moment in time when there was a lot of assassinating going on.

Those people who had signed the treaty, signers were killed, within a year of everyone removing.

And then there were fear of reprisals.

And so the United States government had to step in when they got out there.

And I could see where the culture breaks down and you start having this kind of stuff.

But where they placed in reservations or did they have open, how did they settle in Oklahoma?

They were given tracts of land.

They were sort of the precursor to our reservations, they were larger, because they hadn't pushed all of the tribes in that direction yet.

There were more individual tracts as opposed to-- Yeah and then things got trickier after.

So around the turn of the century, around 1900, with the Dallas Act that further divided things up and further decimated tribal autonomy.

We only have a minute left, I'm sorry, this has gone very fast.

So when you do your dissertation and everything, what's that going to be about?

It's going to focus on what the realities of removal was like.

We're going to focus on what these campsites are like, because I think it's an important reminder that the day-to-day realities are a lot more complicated than what we think that they were.

Also, I think it's important to remember that the Cherokee were not just victims, that they had control and they did everything in their power to protect themselves as best that they could.

They made decisions on a day-to-day basis, that tried to mitigate the extreme effects of this really horrendous thing that we were pushing them through.

Well I really appreciate your being here today and good luck with your PhD.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

We'll be back in a moment.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I hope you gained a deep appreciation of the importance of learning about the Trail of Tears.

And I want to thank Erin Whitson for sharing it with us.

Join me again for another edition of "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

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