The Broken Path Native Tribes and the Tragedy of the Trail of Tears

Chapter One

Introduction

A HISTORIC EVENT OCCURRED in the southeastern United States in the 1830s during the presidency of a military hero, plantation owner, and Democrat, Andrew Jackson. In what came to be known as the Trail of Tears, Indian tribes of the southeast were forced to give up their ancestral lands and relocate west of the Mississippi River, opening those lands to white settlement. The idea of resettling Indian tribes was nothing new. The white occupancy of the South had progressed more quickly than in the North, fuelled by agricultural expansion. The Indians in the South were not only impeding this expansion but were occupying some of the best farmlands. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, much to the displeasure of white American colonists, had defined the Indian territory and had guaranteed against white intrusion in it, but American independence in 1781 voided the proclamation. Two decades later, the Louisiana Purchase opened huge swaths of land to American settlement and created the possibility of an exchange of lands between Indians and whites, with the Indians moving west. The Indians, however, refused this possibility.

The plantation South required unfettered expansion, and the Indians were denying it. This led to increased tensions, which Jackson ultimately resolved via forced removal. In doing so, he became a hero to white Southerners but a villain to the estimated 60,000 Indians who were forced to move, under extremely difficult conditions, to a new environment that they did not know or understand.

This book testifies to the horrors of the Trail of Tears, which were a direct result of white greed at both local and national levels. It proves that no matter what steps the Indians took, fighting legally or militarily, they were doomed to walk the trail by a white American society that did not want them as neighbors, did not respect them as fellow human beings, and would not bend in their removal efforts. Manifest destiny, the white American belief that God had given them the right and responsibility to conquer and civilize the continent, had to be