Trial Of Tears Research Paper

The unbearable experience during the Trial of Tears was significantly atrocious for the Cherokee. A Cherokee woman named Elizabeth Watts described this ordeal as “more than tears” and as “death, sorrow, hunger, exposure, and humiliation” to the Cherokee; even Private John G. Burnett said he “witnessed the execution and the most brutal order in the history of American warfare.” Eliza Whitmire, who was enslaved by the Cherokee, described the difficulty as “filled with horror and suffering.” First off, the trail was dangerously cold and hot during the seasons. It was fatally cold during the Winter; unbearably hot during the Summer. Eliza Whitmire described the experience as “made in the dead of winter” and she then said “many died from exposure

Elizabeth Watts said they “hunted..and ran them until they got all of them”; she also said the “[w]hite men even robbed their[Cherokee] dead’s graves to get their jewelry and other little trinkets.” Private Burnett, also frowning upon what he saw happen to the Cherokee, talked about seeing “helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades.”; he described his witnessing as the “execution and the most brutal order in the history of American warfare.” According to Whitmire “[t]he women and children were driven from their homes, sometimes with blows and close on the heels of the retreating Indians came greedy whites to pillage the Indian's homes, drive off their cattle, horses, and pigs, and they even rifled the graves for any jewelry, or other ornaments that might have been buried with the dead.” Whenever there is game to survive on, the soldiers would then hunt them all, and the Cherokee do not seem to get any. Aside from weather, the Natives had to suffer brutal treatment by the soldiers escorting them. Overall, the Trail of Tears has a name that suits the troubles the Cherokee suffered. There were the weather conditions and how the soldiers treated the Natives; the Natives suffered from hot and cold weather and oppression by the soldiers. Elizabeth Watts, Private John G. Burnett, Lieutenant L.B. Webster, and Eliza Whitmire documented and witnessed