In 1830 President Jackson signed a law providing for the resettlement of the Native Americans to the west of the Mississippi River. In the next ten years sixty thousand Native Americans were forced to migrate. In 1838, of the eleven thousand, five hundred Cherokees forced to move, about four thousand died along the way. Despite the fact that people such as Henry Clay, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster stood up for this educated tribe of the Cherokees, Jackson -whose life had been saved by the chief of the Cherokees, Junaluska, during the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1812- signed the law for removing and resettling. The removal policy also led to a clash between Jackson and the U.S. Supreme Court, which had ruled in favor of the right of the Cherokees to retain their lands in Georgia. Jackson refused to enforce the Court's decision, and beginning in the spring of 1837 and continuing through the fall of 1838, the Cherokee people, like the other tribes before them, were forced westward. They were rounded up and corralled into hastily constructed stockades. So began the "Trail of Tears," a twelve hundred mile journey through the dead of winter to unfamiliar land in Indian Territory, later called Oklahoma. Under the command of General Winfield Scott, over six hundred wagons, steamers and keel boats moved about sixteen thousand Cherokee by land and by river. The infamous journey took between one hundred and four and one hundred and eighty nine days, and before they arrived in Oklahoma, torrential rains, ice storms, disease and broken heartedness had claimed the lives of at least 4,000 men, women, and children. About one thousand Cherokee escaped removal and remained in the Great Smoky Mountains, which form the boundary between Tennessee and North Carolina. Will Thomas, an adopted Cherokee, purchased 56,000 acres which eventually became the Qualla Boundary. The government let them stay and they became known as the Eastern Band of Cherokee. I...
