History of the Trail of Tears, Part II

and just a fifteen second recap of part one. Um, we earned eighteen thirty roughly, and uh, America is getting along great with Native Americans and they say, why don't we all just live together and we can all just share wealth the end. Oh wait, that's not what was happening at all. No Americans wanted more land Indians headland. Americans felt that the Indians weren't putting it to good enough use and used that to morally justify forcing them

to leave their land. That's right in the forum officially of the eighteen thirty Removal Act. And uh, that's where we pick up in the government said, you know what, let's start off with future podcaster Chuck Bryant's tribe, the Choco Tall. Are you Choco Tall? I have very uh negligible amount of chocodall as long as it's not negligent. No. In fact, I'm not exactly sure how much, but I know my uh we but I think my dad did my family tree at one point and I got some

chocd on me. I love Choctaw. Yeah, that's great. So they picked the Choctall because they said, um, well they're pretty friendly and we think this can be a good um I mean, was it sort of a proof of concept? That's what I how this could work. They said, how about you guys go first? And the Choctaw said, okay, fine,

we'll sign this. We'll sign this treaty where we're going to seed all of our land east of the Mississippi to the federal government and in exchange, we're going to get a sizeable amount of land in this new Indian territory what you guys will later call Oklahoma. And the Choctaw again, they they went largely willingly, even though they were split internally, like all the tribes were to some degree, right, but the the there were and there were three divisions.

In the Eastern division, which was led by Chief Mushila tobi Uh. He basically said, you know what, we're not gonna win this war. Let's just we'll just sign this treaty. So he negotiated the treaty, and the Choctaw moved, and as they were moving, they they the whole thing was carried out, The whole Indian removal process was carried out by the War Department, which in and of itself says something.

The fact that it's being carried out by federal soldiers with guns and bayonets, um, rather than say, some other civilian department. That in and of itself says a lot. Right, that's going to form a certain type of um tension to the whole thing. Yeah, it reminds me of the great movie. Uh, Doctor Strangelove. There's no fighting in the war room. It's one of the best lines from that movie. So the Choctaw are going. Some of them said no, I'm not going, and they were shackled and bound and

were forced to undertake this journey. Um. I think if you if you look at the the trail that the Cherokees took, I think it was like miles for them. They were coming from the Carolinas and Georgia by way of Middle Tennessee. I think. But the choctawer we're coming

from Mississippi and Alabama. It may have been a little shorter, but regardless, the Choctaw were forced to march Um with very little supplies, with very little care taken to prevent them from dying, Um for several hundred, if not a thousand miles out of their homelands to this new Indian terror tory, and a lot of them did die on the way. Yeah, And I get the feeling that the you know, the ones dying were like the attitude as well, that's just fewer people we have to worry about. That

is very astute. I think that that is kind of the impression that it was kind of like you're you're lucky, we're letting any of you move anyway and not just exterminating all of you. Right, and again, like I pointed out in the last episode, um, there was I think in this other attitude that like, well, I mean, you're you're American Indians. You can just it doesn't matter where

you're from. You can get along out there, Like it doesn't matter that you're coming from the lush, green uh southeastern what would become United States and moving out to the Great Plains, which you know nothing about you don't know how to succeed their farm there. Necessarily, they probably could have figured it out because they had done so all across North America for you know, eons, but um, it was they weren't set up for success in any

way being relocated. So Choctaw died along the way out of twenty thousand died in three waves of migration, and the first group to arrive in Oklahoma found some reporters waiting there and um, there too already, Yeah, there were settlers and when the I'm sure when the eastern tribes got there, they were like white people, know you promised, Um, But when the when the first group, the first of the three Choctall waves, and from what I understand, they

were the first ones to move under the Indian Removal Act. But when they got there, there were some reporters there that said, you know, how, how was it basically one scale of one to ten. And one of the Choctaw chiefs who who it was exactly was lost to history was either Chief Nitta Catchy or Chief John Harkins, and one who described it as a trail of tears and death. And that's where the Trail of Cheers ultimately got it's its name from was an an unknown Choctaw chief who

were the was among the first to arrive in Oklahoma. Yeah, and you'll hear um a lot of names in this part two, like Chief John Harkins, and you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't sound like a very American Indian name. And these are just great examples of how unculturated some of these factions of tribes had become like they were speaking English, they were had English names, and um still

being removed. Yeah and again traded extensively white people. A lot of them were Christian Um, some of them fought alongside the federal government, and yes, they were still being removed, all right, So the Trail of Tears was kind of coined there, although it wouldn't like you said earlier in the first episode that the the the Cherokee Trail of Tears is sort of what most people think about is

the official Trail of tears. But regardless, this reporter got this, blasted it out, and the whole world sort of is now privy to these stories of this atrocity going on. So you might think, well, they probably just tried this once then and got so much blowback that they said Yeah, this is does not look good for us. Um, so we should kind of stop it. Yeah that's not how it went. No, not how it went at all. No,

the the whole process ground on. I think there was kind of a probably a sense among the pro removal factions in Washington saying like just died out of its way less than we thought it was gonna be, you know, an acceptable amount of casualties. Basically, so um and um. With with the white Americans as well, the idea was ultimately Indians are gonna be free from encroachment by whites out there in Indian territory. The War Department is tasked

with making sure that happens. The War Department did not do that, and in fact, when they got out west, they found the same type of harassment and encroachment that that they experienced east of the Mississippi as well. Well, maybe worse too, because not only were white settlers west of the Mississippi encroaching, they, like we talked about in episode one, there were already plains Indians. They were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa who who are these people? You know, I know

they look like us, but we're different, you know. And the White settlers, like what are you talking about, Like, we're encroaching on your land too, So it was it was not friendly in any way, you know, this arrival. Plus, also after the War of eighteen twelve and um the Seminole Wars, the US didn't have any European powers on the continent any longer, which meant two things. One, the Indians weren't a useful buffer between the US and say

the British, they didn't need. They weren't needed in that respect any longer, which put them in a very shaky position. And then secondly, there was no European power that the Indians could ally themselves with to check a Erican aggression against they had done with both Britain and Spain. So after that and during this Indian removal process, part of the reason why it was so rough and brutal was because there was no reason outside of anything moral, to

check American aggression in this process. Yeah, so things got worse. A bad situation got worse. Right here in Georgia again with the Cherokee Nation, they held these lotteries between eighteen

o five and eighteen thirty two. They had seven lotteries basically where you could Uh, a white male could, if you're over eighteen years old, could buy a lottery ticket for four bucks about a hundred dollars today, and that would give you a chance if you were picked to buy a hundred and sixty acre tract of land that was not theirs, right, That kind of says it all. Yeah, And those those a lot of those parcels still exist. You can trace the the land parcels back to the

original lot today. We call them subdivisions. Yeah, you know, yeah, he said about three quarters of these parcels in Georgia you can still trace backs. That's amazing. So the Chickasaws were up next, Chuck. They were sick of being harassed and um by white settlers and said, we're out of here. We'll we'll we'll take the government up on its offer. Here are all of our lands east of the Mississippi. We'll take some land west of the Mississippi. And the

government said, great, here's a treaty, let's sign it. Uh, slape each other on the back, maybe have a cigar, and that's that. And the Choctawk got or the Chickasaw got out to Indian Territory and found they didn't have any land out there. Yeah, they had to negotiate with the Choctaw who'd gotten out there a year or two earlier, to buy some of their land. Talk about a raw deal, Well,

it is a raw deal. And it's interesting that some of the um I mean, I don't think word was getting back, but you could see a little bit of the wisdom of well, hey, the writings on the wall, So at least we can get out there early and claim some land of our own. And that's what happened. You know, the Choctaw had claimed this land, and then the Chickasaw had to come out there and deal with them.

Well I think I think no, I think they they had been given actual territory by the federal government, but they they it didn't pan out. They hadn't actually gotten that land, right, I mean, it wasn't, like you said, the War Department just sort of wash their hands of it. All right. So then you also have the Seminole as well, Right, the Seminal took a different tax. They they were definitely the ones that were the biggest thorn in the side

of the Indian removal process. Yeah. Sure, So you remember back in I think eighteen seventeen, eighteen eighteen, Andrew Jackson fought the First Seminole War. He did not win the first Seminole War. The Seminoles were still there, and although he did get a lot of land from the Spanish

in Florida, the Seminoles ultimately came out on top. The Second Seminole War took play when the UM when the Seminoles, a very small faction that were prepared to leave, went against the wishes of the tribe in general, and negotiated secretly with the federal government to see the land and the seminal. The rest of the Seminole tried said no, they didn't represent us, we're not leaving in. The federal government said, oh yeah, well we're gonna come down and invade.

And the Second Seminole War UM went from eighteen thirty five to eighteen forty two. Yeah, man, seven years, that's tough. Yeah. Thousands and thousands of people died. It was a war, straight up war between the Seminoles and the federal government. And again the Seminoles won. Yeah. You said here that the UM in today's dollars, the government spent about two billion dollars fighting the war. About a billion billion dollars. Okay, yeah,

sorry about that. Um So, that's number two. The Third Seminal War was from eighteen fifty five to eighteen fifty eight, and that was the last attempt of the US to say please get out of here all, not please, but get the heck out of here. And that failed. And so eventually the Seminole got paid pretty good money the holdouts there for their land. So you know, I mean, if there's a success story and all of this the Seminoles, but yeah, it it also resulted in the deaths of

a lot of people. Yeah. Uh So this next part is sort of sets up to play out over kind of the remaining years of the Trail of Tears. And there are important names in here that, um you should take note of, So get out your pad and pen exactly, don't literally take a note, especially if you're driving. Um So, the Cherokee they they sort of did a similar thing that the Seminoles did, when a small group of people make this treaty that the rest of the tribe doesn't

necessarily agree with. And this time it was called the Treaty of New Ecatoa. I thought it was Atkatoa at first two but then I stopped and realized, I think it's etoa Eta. I think, so all right, we'll go with Echtowa. I like that better anyway. Uh So, they were about twenty Cherokee leaders that um and the names they were headed at this point at Chief John Ridge, his brother Major Ridge. Uh stand, how do you pronounced that last name? I think W A t I E.

And alias Buddha no um. And again a lot of these names are very Anglo because they had assimilated at this point, and Glow or French. Well, yeah, some of them were Budinos. I think definitely French. Um. So they were about twenty of them and all though, and those were the most notable, and they became known as the

Treaty Party. They were the ones that met with federal agents negotiated this treaty where they would give up this land in exchange for you know, kind of the same old story, the cycle that happens again and again and again. So imagine if you were a Cherokee and you were like, we're not leaving, We're staying. We're gonna fight this in the courts. We're gonna, you know, take our guns to him if we have to. We're not leaving our land.

And you find out that twenty twenty Cherokee leaders went secretly behind the back of the rest of the Cherokee Nation, the other eighteen thousand members of the did the Eastern Tribe and secretly negotiated away that land that you had just vowed to protect and never leave. There's a lot of anger, yes. So the ones that decided that they were going to stay were led by Chief John Ross. He was a very powerful chief um in the East

for decades. He had been negotiating to that point fairly successfully with the federal government, saying, okay, if you're going to if you're gonna take this land, we're gonna sell it to you, and you're gonna pay through the nose for it. Even though they still gave him a pretty fair price, like four dollars and something per acre when

the going rate was about fifteen. But this was this was much more money twenty million dollars I think in in eighteen thirties dollars than um then the government was prepared to spend, which was zero. It was no, you give us the land and you you can move out west instead. So they were negotiating a treaty or John John Ross was with the blessing of the Cherokee Council and the Cherokee people as a whole. And one of the other um parts of that that negotiation was that anyone,

any Cherokee would be recognized as a full U. S. Citizen. Yeah, it sounds like he had like a couple of different versions of the offer. One as you can have all this land for twenty million bucks, or you can have some of it for four million bucks, let us keep some and whoever wants to stay can become full citizens

with all the rights afforded to a full citizen. So he was actually in the middle making what was, you know, not a bad deal for his people, know, and again and he had the full the blessing of the Cherokee Council to do this. Yeah, And did he not know at all that the Treaty Party was doing this from what I understand, No, it was a secret, secret negotiation

and they were happening concurrently. So the the John Ross faction was negotiating for about four bucks an acre, the the Treaty Party negotiated for about a dollar five and acre, or about five percent of the value of the land. And they the government said we'll go with you. Guys. They signed the treaty. Uh. The Cherokee when they found out about it, um, basically signed a petition saying that's an illegal treaty. We don't we don't condone that. They

got something like seventeen thousand signatures. They're only eighteen thousand Cherokees in the East. And the Senate still ratified it. Yeah, they said, that's just very Let's see all those names, it's very impressive. Uh, let me rip that into shoot two pieces, and we're gonna ratify this. Uh, and it becomes a federal statute. And um, this kind of is what really set everything in motion for the final removal of the Cherokee. Yeah, you Cherokee now have three years

to vacate your land. And uh, if you don't, well let's just say you should vacate your land within three years. Is what the federal government said. But they still, for the most part, didn't leave. And we'll take a break here and we'll talk about that process after this. All right, So we're back. Um, the treaty had been signed in against the will of the Cherokee people. They had three years to get I was gonna say, get out of Dodge, But man, why do I keep saying that? Get out

of Cherokee? And then I was about to say they had three years to play ball, but they'd be like, what does playball mean? Well, it hadn't been invinited yet either, Get with the chuck. Three years later, only two thousand of the eighteen thousand had migrated west. And so President Martin van Buren, who's as we saw earlier, kind of just continue to carry out Jackson's policies. Yeah. Jackson was a two term president, and the Van Buren presidency just

made it twelve basically, yeah, twelve years. Yeah. Uh. He said, all right, well, here's what we're gonna do, because Jackson is telling me I have to do this. We're gonna send in federal troops and you hold outs in Georgia and the Carolina's um. We have a general named Winfield Scott. He's gonna bring about seven thousand men in there, and he's going to ask you nicely to leave, and that he doesn't want bloodshed all while tapping on his side,

are on us hip exactly, which is basically what happened. Yeah, he had a he had a quote here you want to read that he read a statement he said, the blood of the white man or the blood of the red man, may be spilt, and if spilt, however accidentally, it may be impossible for the discreet and humane among you or among us, to prevent a general war and carnage. Think of this, my Cherokee brethren. I am an old warrior and have been present at many a scene of slaughter.

But spare me. I beseech you the horror of witnessing the destruction of the Cherokees. In other words, don't make me kill all of you. And let's think about what we will. We have seven thousand men behind me. Yeah, and think about where this came from. Like this was we want your land. You have to leave. That's that. And now it's gotten to the point where we're going

to kill you if you don't leave. And when they came and forced them to leave finally, uh and eighteen thirty eight, at gunpoint, they said you have to leave now. And and it was not gather your stuff and leave, it was stop what you're doing and leave. Most of the people um were not able to get their supplies together. Some were able to grab blankets, A lot of them were barefoot um and they were herded out of their houses. Yeah, you said there was one case where there were these uh,

there was a small child who had died. Uh at the night that they were preparing for burial, and they turn guns on them and said no, no no, no, you can't even do that. Get out, And they had to leave this body of a child behind by itself. Plus they also had to suffer the um in dignity of watching white settlers loot their houses as they were being marched away. Oh yeah, the people that have been encroaching all these years had free reign at this point. It

was open season. So the the the federal government had built thirty one posts around the Caroline and is in Georgia, which were basically like temporary holding stations before the forced migration began. And like a third of the people who died during this um removal process among the Cherokee died in these posts. They died of exposure, they died of hunger. There's like disease ripping through these things. It was just

a terrible situation even just to start. Yeah, and you know, as far as what's going on today, regardless of how you feel about deportation, just look into deportation facilities. Are they pretty bad? I mean it wasn't you know, people weren't dying of aren't dying of cholera. But just go look it up. Make your own judgment. I'll say that, Okay, I don't want to get too political here. Um, all right, So there are a couple of routes here that the

Cherokee took to get to Oklahoma. Basically, you could go on a boat or you can walk. Right, Maybe if you're old and frail, you might be in a wagon, but basically you're gonna walk. Yeah. The draft animals were for carrying supplies. The wagons were just for the elderly and maybe like little little little kids. Um, but yeah, you're gonna have to walk in Again. A lot of these people were removed from their homes with and not giving even enough time to get their shoes. So they

were walking barefoot twelve miles. Yeah, and I think about fifteen thousand by foot in about three thousand. We're fortunate enough, I guess you could say, to go by steamship. Yeah. And we should say also that the experience of this is not it's not the same for everybody. Right, there were plenty of very wealthy Cherokees who who arranged for their own passage west, including one guy, rich Joe Van.

He was I don't know where he made his money, but he was a wealthy Cherokee who um traveled privately on his own steamship. Yeah. I mean, if he owned a steamship, he's doing pretty well. Sure. Uh. And again you point out in the article this is it's just another reminder of how uncultured some of these Native Americans have become at this point. And they were still like, now, man, you're ostensibly living like a wealthy white person, but you're

still Indians. To get out right them again, the overlooked group in this too seems to be the African American slaves. Um. Again, some Cherokee's owned slaves, and the slaves were made to to go on the Trail of Tears with them as well. Yeah, or forced to. Um, you know. The ones who didn't have to go west were forced to relocate from all over the colonies, largely down south to support the cotton industry.

That was a big deal. Um. So this land that opened up immediately became like cotton land, and it created the biggest agricultural economy in the world. The American South had the biggest, largest, most robust agricultural economy in the entire world during this period as a result of this land opening up. But part of that required this slave labor and so um, the slave trade increased dramatically during

this period as well. So the the forced removal of Native Americans led to a forced diaspora of African Americans into that land that had just been vacated where they were forced to work, which is, Yeah, it's an overlooked part of history for sure. I mean, we all understand, we know about slavery, and we know that it happened, and that was in the South or whatever. But this this period was where it just steps up exponentially as

a direct result of the forced removal. Yeah, I mean, like hundreds of thousands of acres of land all of a sudden that needed tending to um, millions of acres, millions of millions of acres, Yeah, which is a lot of hundreds of thousands. Be like does of acres about forty million dozen? Uh So back to the the westward trail of tears Um. This first migration was in the summer of eight and I don't know if anyone out there has ever walked from Georgia to Oklahoma at all.

I wonder if that's like a thing hike the Trail of tears. Uh jeez, I don't know. I bet somebody does, probably like in an awareness campaign or something. I could see that. Um, so that it was in the summer heat. It's it's not forgiving in any way. UM. A lot of people died on that first wave. And I don't think we mentioned that. Chief John Ross, he was the last of the Cherokee of his group to to leave,

to pick up and leave. Yeah, the federal government was doing such a disastrously bad job of overseeing this migration that John Ross went to General Scott and said, please, if we're going to migrate, let me oversee the remaining migrations because you guys are botching this. And Scott actually said, okay, fine, you can oversee the migrations. Despite Andrew Jackson angrily writing like, no,

there's a terrible idea, Do not do that. You can't let the Indians oversee their own forced migration, you dummy, Scott still did it. He stood up to the political pressure. Um. And so the Trail of Tears historically, what you think of the official trail of tears started at the Rattlesnake in Rattlesnake Springs, Tennessee, which is where he said, Is that middle Tennessee. I think it's middle like around Memphis. Maybe is in Memphis in the center, Memphis, West Nashville.

Then I think it's around Nashville. Okay, Tennessee is uh you know, my family's from Tennessee and your chop taw Well Mississippi, uh, before Tennessee, but mainly from West Tennessee, which has got probably more in common with Arkansas than like Nashville. You're like, maybe you've heard of my cousin. He was falsely accused of killing some boys back in the eighties. Oh, the Memphis Three. No, not a cousin, but they were in Arkansas, West Memphis, Arkansas. It's confusing. Um,

it's not that confused. Well, I mean West Memphis, Arkansas. You hear Memphis, you generally think of Tennessee. That's the east Memphis. We should do a show in Elvis, are we? Well, we do one on grace Land. Yeah. And I think that's when I pointed out to that God Bless my dear departed grandmother, but she was of that camp like, oh, Elvis, he's poor thing. He just his doctors killed him. And I was like grandmother. He was a big fat junkie,

died on the toilet. Made some great music though. Um. All right, So Elvis Aside Rattlesnake Springs, Tennessee is where the Trail of Tears, officially the route kind of began. Um. And it went through And this is something that I never considered it went or you know it. Let's take a break. That's a good little teaser there, and we'll talk about, um, the impact it had on these towns that it went through. All right. I teased that I

had never realized this. But um, the old story you heard about white people lining up in their towns to watch the Native Americans passed through and shed a tear for them, which is bunk. Or maybe one person did, probably yeah, Um, but it had a big like you can't move eighteen thousand people, and that was just the Cherokee without um. You know, there's a big economic boon that can happen when you go through a town of that many with that many people. And they went through many, many,

many towns. The government spent two and a half two point one five billion dollars in two thousand fifteen money, um, moving the Cherokee and all of that was for things like supplies and stuff like that. So the entire um, I think Arkansas, I think it was Arkansas. Their entire agricultural economy shifted from the cotton boom that was going on in the rest of the South to growing corn strictly to supply the federal government for this migration. Yeah.

The Trail of Tears itself had its own economy, right, it's own moving portable economy. Yeah. A lot of cottage industries grew up where um, you know, peep townspeople would get into like porting, ferrying, helping carry supplies, or moving people across bodies of water. Um. Some were exploitive, not surprisingly, Like there were people who said, well, this is my land, and I'm going to charge each of you a fee for crossing over it, and then an exit fee when

you get to the other side kind of stuff, you know. Yeah, and some of the town's would, I guess, despite the fact that it would could have been a bit of a temporary economic boom, refused to even let it happen, Like you can't have passage through my town, even though it's easier on you. You got to go around this entire town. Yea cape gerro Doe. UM did that in Missouri. They said, it's way easier to cross the Mississippi through town, but there's another crossing two miles up and it's treacherous,

but you've got to take that one. So some of this was documented by UM white soldiers who were overseeing. I guess from the War Department. Um, should we read a couple of these accounts? Well, yeah, I think we should. This one in particulars from John G. Burnett, who in eighteen ninety, as he was an old man dying, he was interviewed by a newspaper for his experiences because he had been a soldier along the trailer tears with the Cherokee.

All right, I'll read one of these, Um. I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades, and in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning, I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep in the six hundred and forty five wagons and started toward the west. One can never forget the sadness and solemnity of that morning. Chief John Ross led him prayer, and when the bugle

sounded in the wagons started rolling. Many of the children rose to their feet and waved their little hands goodbye to their mountain homes, knowing they were leaving them forever. Many of these helpless people did not have blankets, and many of them have been driven from their home barefooted. On the morning of November seventeenth, we've encountered a terrific

sleet and snowstorm with freezing temperatures. And from that day until we reached the end of the Fateful journey on March eighteen thirty nine, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire, and I have known as many as twenty two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold and exposure. Among this number was the beautiful Christian wife of Chief John Ross.

This noble hearted woman died of martyr to childhood, giving her only blanket for the protection of a sick child. She rode thinly clad the blinding sleet and snowstorm, developed pneumonia, and died in the still hours of a blique winter night with her head resting on Lieutenant Gregg's saddle blanket. So clearly some of the soldiers were kind of haunted with the task that they were given. Yeah, because this guy, John Brunette, was on the trail in eighteen thirty eight,

this is eighteen ninety. He's still giving this impassioned like account of it, you know. Man, Um, there was another witness who's who estimated that the Cherokee buried fourteen or fifteen of a people at every stopping place. And this was along this mile trail, which they did about ten miles a day by foot. And as a result, about four thousand of the seven thousand, seventeen thousand Cherokee who uh moved during this migration died along the way. Yeah.

And again, um, just like the cycle all Uh. When they got there, they were not met with open arms. Remember the old settlers that we talked about from the very beginning, the very first ones to go out west. Uh, they did not take kindly to their arrival. No, because remember they formed basically a different tribe of Cherokee out there. Yeah, like they were their own tribe that you know, I said, you know what, all bets are off is our land.

So when they showed up, the Eastern Cherokees were like, yeah, but there's a lot more of us than there are of you guys. So we're we're in charge now. Yeah. And I think one of the more interesting things, you know, we mentioned when I said to take note with that new Achitoah Treaty with those twenty um, what was it twenty or so twenty leaders leaders that that signed this treaty against the will of John Ross. Those I mean

that stuff was like in stone. Now, this faction that was created with that carried through for decades and decades and and and that same line carried over yeah out west as well. Right, So allegiances formed between the treaty party supporters and the John Ross supporters, and ultimately John Ross was able to consolidate power out there, and he became the chief of all of the Cherokees now that they were all out west, the the combined tribe. Yeah.

And once once he consolidated power, he gave it a day or two and then he said, okay, it's time to have the treaty party members killed. Yeah. He he had vengeance on his mind for sure, So he dispatched. Uh. And one night on June nine, he dispatched some assassins. Um. They went and found the principal signers. We mentioned Major Ridge, his brother John Ridge, and Elias Budino. They all died that night, but stand Watti interestingly escaped. And I don't

think we said you know, we said it. Um. That faction and that divide between the nation was going on for decades. It lasted into the Civil War, and the new Etchetowa supporters supported the South, the others opposed to the North. So the divide between the Union and the Confederacy also fell along that new etchetoa Treaty party and John Ross supporters line still and they fought each other as Confederate and Union soldiers. Yeah. And actually stand Watty

became a general in the Confederacy. Yes, he survived the assassination attempt. Uh. He got out because he was warned by the Reverend Samuel H. Worcester maybe Worcestershire. Uh. And he was I think we mentioned him earlier. He was a missionary who originally filed that suit against Georgia on behalf of the Cherokee that went to the Supreme Court,

and um he was he warned Watty. Watty got out, went on to fight in the Civil War, and he was the last general to surrender in the Confederacy, the last one, not the last Cherokee general, the last general of the Confederacy to surrender. So he very interesting story there. So overall, Chuck, between eighteen thirty and eighteen fifty, I said it was a decade earlier. I think the eighteen

thirties were the worst of it. But between those those twenty years, the US government moved more than one hundred thousand Native Americans east of the Mississippi to the west of the Mississippi. And not just the five civilized tribes, not just the southeastern or Eastern churches, northern tribes, like basically everyone who was living east of the Mississippi between Canada in the Gulf of Mexico was pushed away across

the Mississippi. And it was the first big massive movement of of Native Americans to what would be basically a sweeping motion by the by America, by the federal government from one edge of the coast to the other, trying to sweep the continent clean of Native Americans. And at first it was here, you go to this other area where Native Americans are, and you can deal with it. And then eventually they started running more out of land more and more, and extermination became more of a policy

than than removal. Yeah, because remember we had said that Thomas Jefferson said, well, the Mississippi River is clearly going to be our western border. Um. They went on to later say, remember when we said that, we would kind of like all the land and we're gonna take it. And in response, finally it was two thousand nine, I think before any official oology was proffered for um the Trail of Tears, and it wasn't just the Trail of tears.

It covered everything, anything that had ever been done to Native Americans by the federal government was summed up with an apology for quote the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native people's by citizens of the United States. Back to business. Yeah, and that was drafted UM a few years part of that by Kansas Senator Sam brown Back and UM signed into law by President

Barack Obama and then I guess another. The closest thing to an apology that Georgia ever gave was back in nineteen six Uh, Georgia adopted the Cherokee rose as the official state flower, and according to Cherokee legend, the flower grew from the tears of the mothers who cried for their children along the way, and the flowers still grows along that official trail of tears today, all the way into eastern Oklahoma. Yeah, and that trail is protected um

federally for now at least. So that's trailer tears man, tough one, tough too. Yes. Uh. If you want to know more about the trailer tears, just type those words into your favorite search engine and start learning. And since I said start learning, it's time for listener mail. Uh. This is a correction about the Holy Roman Empire. Hey, guys, I know you'd like to get things right even after the facts, so I thought i'd help you out a bit.

Listening to the Death Tax episode picked up on something you said in this and at least one of the recent episode when you mentioned the Holy Roman Empire. It's pretty clearly referring to Rome during the early part of the first millennium. Ce, but it's actually an incorrect moniker

for that state. The Holy Roman Empire is it's referred to in history, was a collection of Central European traditionally Germanic U states UH, briefly some of Italy early on, under a loose rule by the Holy Roman Emperor, not the Pope who was the ruling papals who was ruling the papal states when the Holy Roman Empire was in

its early existence. Origins of the Holy Roman Empire began in the ninth ninth century, followed by the division of Charlemagne's Frankish kingdom into the three partitions given to each of his three sons, the easternmost, eventually becoming the Holy Roman Empire UH. Without getting into too much specific history, I'll tell you that it's roughly one thousand year run is filled with fascinating events and political structure unique in

world history. Catholic Reformation and the Thirty Years War impacted and influenced heavily the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire and his member states for one, and Chris ort Loff, buddy, you are a student of history. Clearly very well done, and thank you for that nice name dropping of Charlemagne to Chris if you want to school it's like Chris, did we love that kind of thing, especially if it's

nice and pleasant. Uh. You can tweet to us. I'm at josh um Clark and at s Y s K podcast, Chuck's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook and its Stuff you Should Know on Facebook right. You can send us both an email the Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and as always, joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com