The Trail of Tears
More than 150 years ago, in 1839, the United States forced the Cherokee Nation West of the Mississippi River into what later would become the state of Oklahoma. The weather was unusually harsh that winter and the cold, the disease and the hunger cost the Cherokee Nation the lives of "at least four thousand of the fifteen thousand people who traveled the thousand miles West" (Perdue 93). Not only was the journey a very cruel and dangerous one for the Native Americans, but it also upset their tribal lives, particularly the tribal lives of the Cherokee women. This essay will focus on the position of the Cherokee woman in her tribe before and during the relocation West. Native American woman, particularly the Cherokee, lived and thrived in a matrilineal society long before the Europeans immigrated to North America. "Traditionally Cherokee women had a voice in Cherokee government. They spoke freely in council, and the War Woman (or Beloved Woman) decided to the fate of captives" (Perdue 94). The Cherokee men would live in houses that belonged to their wives and to their wife's family. Many tribal members believed that "marriage gives no right to the husband over the property of his wife; and when they part she keeps the chil
This move affected the women tremendously because they were forced into brutal, new lifestyles. Children were often separated from their parents and driven into the stockades with the sky for a blanket and the earth for a pillow (Burnett). Nancy Ward, the Beloved Woman of Chota, spoke to the treaty conference held at Hopewell, South Carolina, to clarify and extend land cessions stemming from Cherokee support of the British in the American Revolution" (Perdue 95). The missionary Daniel Butrick wrote in his journal: The other day a gentleman informed me that he saw six soldiers about two Cherokee women. They seduced the women to drink; and now made them an outcast among their own relatives (Canon 100). she could only carry her dying child in her arms a few miles farther, and then she must stop in a stranger land and consign her much loved babe to the cold ground, and that without pomp and ceremony, and pass on with the multitude (Canon). One tribe member later recalled how his mother was forced to react:When the soldier came to our house, my father wanted to fight, buy my mother told him that the soldiers would kill him if he did and we surrendered without a fight. Burnett recalled how one family was forced to leave the body of a child who had just died and how a distraught mother collapsed of heart failure as soldiers evicted her and her three children from their homes (Burnett). The Cherokee women were also very adamant and vocal peacekeepers. Even the fresh produce and other 'belongings' of a Cherokee belonged to the women because they were the primary farmers. The women stood by a tree, and the soldiers with a bottle of liquor were endeavoring to entice them to drink, though the women, as yet were resisting them. Webster wrote to his wife about moving eight hundred Cherokees from North Carolina to the central depot in Tennessee: "We were eight days in the making the journey, and it was pitiful to behold the women and children, who suffered exceedingly-as they were all obliged to walk, with the exception of the sick". By March 1839, all survivors had arrived in the West. There are at least sixty-nine known cases of newborns that arrived in the West. Journals of removal hold large instances of the burial of children alongside the trail.
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