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

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Almost worse than the physical treatment, was the mental anguish and upset that these government troops caused:

Men working in the fields were arrested and driven to stockades. But sadly, there are also the documented cases of soldiers bayoneting pregnant Cherokee women along the trail. She continued, “ I am in hopes that if you rightly consider that woman is the mother of all-and the woman does no pull children out of trees or stumps nor out of old logs, but out of their bodies, so that they ought to mind what a woman says” (Perdue 94). Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they could not understand. 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”.

Journals of removal hold large instances of the burial of children alongside the trail.

The shock and the upset of the Cherokee Nation’s forced relocation to Oklahoma was very brutal and very painful and upsetting to the lives and mentality of the tribe members. They were no longer at the forefront of decision making, they were now nomadic, desperate people.

The Cherokee women were also very adamant and vocal peacekeepers.

The missionary Daniel Butrick wrote in his journal:

The other day a gentleman informed me that he saw six soldiers about two Cherokee women. The Cherokee women owned their own fields and tended their own crops.

Even the fresh produce and other ‘belongings’ of a Cherokee belonged to the women because they were the primary farmers. Many of these strong Cherokee women were able to not only give birth along the journey, but their children miraculously arrived in Oklahoma safely.

Approximate Word count = 1261
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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