Cherokees learned that neither accommodation nor resistance would save them from removal. The pleas of Cherokee women and their white supporters could not stop the process. Cherokees had lost 90 percent of their pre-colonial territory by 1819. Approximately one million whites in Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas, and Tennessee surrounded seventeen thousand Cherokees. When Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency on March 4, 1829, removal became imminent. The discovery of gold on Cherokee land in Georgia later that year virtually sealed the tribe’s fate.¹

Nine contingents left in October 1838 and four that November. The first detachments, led by John Benge on October 1 and Jess Bushyhead on October 5, boarded Blythe’s Ferry and crossed the Tennessee River where the Hiwassee intersected it. As the Cherokees looked back, they saw their homeland fade into the distance. Their journey of eight hundred miles would take three and a half months.²

In the following excerpt, Evan Jones, a Baptist missionary among the Cherokees, records the suffering of tribal members and comments on the effects on women. Jones served the Cherokee Nation for fifty years, opposed removal, walked with the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears, and continued to minister to them in Indian Territory. Here, he describes how they were brutally forced from their homes into camps by soldiers.

The Cherokees are nearly all prisoners. They have been dragged from their houses and camped at the forts and military posts all over the Nation. In Georgia, especially, the most unfeeling and insulting treatment has been experienced by them, in a general way. Multitudes were not allowed time to take anything with them but the clothes they had on. Well-furnished houses were left prey to plunderers who like hungry wolves, follow the progress of the captors and in many cases accompany them. These wretches rifle the houses and strip the helpless, unoffending owners of all they have on earth. Females who have been habituated to comforts and comparative affluence are driven on foot before the bayonets of brutal men. Their feelings are mortified by the blasphemous vociferations of these heartless creatures. It is a painful sight. The property of many has been taken and sold before their eyes for almost nothing; the sellers and buyers being in many cases combined to cheat the poor Indian…. Cherokees are deprived of their liberty and stripped of their entire property at one blow. Many who a few days ago were in comfortable circumstances are now the victims of abject poverty…. I say nothing yet of several cold-blooded murders and other personal cruelties, for I would most conscientiously avoid making the slightest erroneous impression on any persons, being not in possession of precise and authentic information concerning all the facts in these cases of barbarity.³

ENDNOTES

¹ David Williams, The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-Niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 14, 19.

² For more on the Trail of Tears, see Carolyn Ross Johnston, Cherokee Women in Crisis: Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838–1907 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 56–78.

³ Evan Jones, Journal, June 16, 1838, Missionary Correspondence, 1800–1900, microfilm reel 98, American Baptist Historical Society, Atlanta, Ga. See Cherokee Nation Papers, reel 44, RG 2, Treaty Fund Claims, 1831–83, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla., for details of typical claims.