From all the population’s forced relocations that happened in our history, the trail of Tears is probably one of the most famous of them, and often refers as a really dark chapter in the US history. Its appellation, “Trail of Tears”, says a lot about the conditions that the Indian populations had to go through during this organized removal. The consideration that the government authorities, led by President Andrew Jackson, had about the Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek tribes, was inexistent at that time. These forced removals bring us to the point of questioning ourselves: how could a US president encourage the removal of thousands of Indians, based on the fact that their land brimmed with gold? How was this even tolerated by the public opinion, and sometimes ignored by powerful institutions, like the Supreme Court?
We will first talk about the Cherokee history, and then about the Indian Removal Act and treaty, which happened between 1827 and 1836. Next, we will evoke the removal that took place in 1838, and then the main point of this paper, the Trail of Tears, between 1838 and 1839. We will end with the conclusion.
II. Cherokee history
When the white Europeans arrived in the 16th century, the Cherokee were growing tribe with a population that kept
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It was not a single route, as we may think, but several of them, either by foot or by boat, that took thousands of American Indians. It lasted almost a year, from the summer 1838 to the spring of 1839. As said before, the conditions were terrible. Walking for approximately 10 months non-stop is exhausting and many Cherokee did not make it to their final destination. The really dry climate, the road conditions, the diseases… All of this made it really tiring for the Indians, even more because of the military, who pushed them to go as fast as they could to reach their