The Trail of Tears | The Frontier

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with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe to bring the past alive. In 1831, the French political thinker and writer, Alexis de Toppo, visited Memphis, Tennessee. As he stood on the banks of the Mississippi River, he caught sight of a horrendous scene. Master moves of native Choctaw people from their ancestral home lands.

In his book Democracy in America, he described what he saw that day. In a whole scene,

there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable

adieu. One couldn't watch without feeling one's heart rung. He asked one man why they were leaving. The answer came back simply to be free. What Tokeville witnessed that day would come to be remembered

“as one of the darkest chapters of American history, the beginning of what is now commonly referred”

to as the Trail of Tears. Dear listeners, welcome again to American History Hit, I'm Don Wildman. The idea of the frontier, to which we've dedicated so much time lately in this series, lives on in our collective American imagination, still charges the spirit of this country. But the idea of white settlers of the colonial period into the American Republic is of course

in direct opposition to those already living upon that land. As settlers pushed westward, native nations were pushed aside, pressured, killed. This painful legacy in mind in this our fifth and final episode of our frontier miniseries, we turned to one of the darkest chapters of this checkered past. The Trail of Tears is a story of forced removal and migration, but it is also one of endurance, identity, and survival. And today we explore it all in its

particulars when why and how it all happened and of course what it meant and still means to the native nations who were driven from their home lands. To lead in this telling, I'm joined by Ryan Spring, cultural research associate in the historic preservation department of the chalked all nation of Oklahoma himself a member of the chalked all nation. Hello Ryan, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you Don, it's a pleasure to be here. Before we discuss the trail of

Tears itself, I want to mention that the trail of Tears is not one thing, but several. There were different forced march migrations for different nations and we'll discuss all this later.

The chalked out were the first, and so it's helpful, especially to understand their experience.

But as I say, it's the first of several that happen over a kind of 20-year period, roughly 1830-1850.

“Regarding the chalked out, who were they and where were their native home lands geographically?”

So our stories place the chalked out people in the south-eastern part of the United States since time immemorial. And so we are a western muskogian speaking people, that's our language group, and so we speak the chalked all language, which is in common with some of our related tribes that are still here with us today. So we're talking about Mississippy, Louisiana, what is today, those areas, how large a population are we talking about, as far as the the chalked out are concerned?

Yeah, so in the 1831 Armstrong role that the US government took of chalked all people, they estimated chalked all around 20,000. But we know that our people were much larger than that. So while our homelands are in Mississippy in Alabama, we had several chalked all people that were living in Louisiana and Arkansas. And so a lot of those people had left the tribe and they had made new homes to the west. How was this society organized? So our society on a large scale level

was made up of three districts, which we call Othty. These districts each had a district chief, and each district chief represented all of the individual village chiefs that were under him. So we see at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, there's over 60 chiefs in attendance. Wow. So that means that each district had plus or minus about, you know, 20 villages, underneath them. And so each of these villages would have a village chief,

and they had a war chief. And so the village chief called the Meco, and the servant chief called the Tisha Meco helped run all of the political affairs for the village.

community, that sort of thing. But all the day to day life was run by the women. Yeah. And so our kinship is passed, matrilineally, which means all of our bloodlines go through our women. And so each village had two Iksa, Iksa's the word that we have for our moiety, and also for our clans. And so moiety is the closest word that we have. There's not many tribes that organize

themselves like the Chalktalk did. And so we borrow that Scottish word for moiety. And it basically

means that each village had two groups in there. You had the beloved people and the people on the other side, also known as the divided people. And so that basically just means, you know,

“underneath those two Iksa were several clans. But that's how our communities and that's how our”

tribe was organized. It is a political system, I suppose you could call it, a cultural system that has been developed for thousands of years, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when we talk about homeland, we are just, we're talking about places where people have lived generations upon generations in a increasingly ordered and sophisticated society. That is frequently misunderstood by

people today, you know, as white settlers confront these nations out west, you know, the idea of

civilizing them and all that sort of thing completely wrongheaded, because there was, it had already been civilized on their terms. Yeah. We can see in our identity as Chalktalk people or tied to the land, directly. And so our language, our knowledge, our stories, our entire

“world view as Chalktalk people comes from the interactions that our ancestors have had with the land”

and have had with God over 14,000 years. Yeah. I mean, and this is central to the whole story, of course, of this, of this tragedy, because like all indigenous people, I would say, the Chalktalk camp be separated from their ancestral lands because their entire system of life is deeply entrenched in that natural connection. History, language, culture, all of that is tied up with the homeland. And that is what we're going to be talking about being destroyed. I want to

back up just a little bit more. The creation story is based on this as well. Can you explain that idea that these people come from the land in this story? So we have an old story, you know, it goes back to time immemorial, but we call it our creation story. It's one of our

“origin stories. And the story basically states that God had created the land, it created the earth,”

and he wanted to create people to put upon it. These people to be stewards of the land that he had created. And so God took yellow clay from a local creek, which we know today is Naniwaia Creek, and he went deep underground and started shaping people out of the clay. After he had made many, many people, he created an opening in the earth, and ushered the people forward to come out to the surface to the world that he had created. And so in Mississippi, there is a mound that we call

Naniwaia Chilok, which means it's the cave of creation. And so there is a cave opening where people came out on the side of a hill, a natural hill, and they laid upon the hill. And so the

first group of people used to come out, they started traveling to the east, to the northeast,

to the southeast. These people traveled out. They became all of the different tribes that our people are associated with, that were related to. And so the last group of people came out, and they looked back, and they saw that there were no more people coming. God had stopped creating people. And so the last group decided to stay at their place of creation and to live there. And they called themselves the Chatta, or the Chatta people. And so the story talks about how God just didn't

create us. But God gave us our language, gave us our laws, and gave us what we call the Heenahanta, or the bright path, which is a way to live by. And as long as we would be in the lands that God gave us would be successful. It's the kind of story you can find these creation stories in other societies, of Polynesians, you know, finding coming from the oceans. It is this direct connection to the land that is continuous through the civilization, whereas European societies with the industrialization

that was happening at Sam Period were kind of broken away from the land and thinking of how they were going to build societies. And that's kind of in the most general sense. That's the opposition that's happening here as European settlers move west. And into this world, people are of this land connected to the land and are about to be wrenched from their lands. When Europeans begin to arrive,

So in the early 1500s, Choctaw people are destabilized by a massive loss of life,

“waves and waves of diseases, diseases that have never been seen by native communities and the”

southeast, especially by Choctaw communities, started killing our people. Over a 200-year period, over 90% of the native population in the Americas was killed. We're talking about millions of people are dying. And so there's a lot of Choctaw people at this time living in west central and west southern Alabama. And they're living a style of large corn agriculture, having these huge cities. And they've started moving away from this lifestyle at this point, you know, a choice

that they had made. But then diseases on top of that really push them away from it. And so

it's difficult to understand, but you know, imagine the town that you're from. And imagine 90%

of the people dying. How does your community continue functioning? And so what Choctaw people did

“is they moved out of these large river valleys and they moved back into their place of creation.”

Now there's already Choctaw people living there. And so these groups from the east, these large Choctaw populations in Alabama, especially around what we call Mountainville, which is one of our large urban areas, started moving west and they started intermingling and melding back in with other Choctaw people that were near our place of creation. And then we had people from southwest Alabama around Mobile Bay living at the Battle Creek area. And they started

coming in and moving. And so as we started absorbing in all of these Choctaw speaking communities, we're able to rebuild, rebuild our lifeways, rebuild our culture. But this is what created our three districts. You have the people that are living there. You have people moving in

“from the west and people moving in from the southwest. And they created these three different”

cultural regions. What year are we talking about here? It's hard to tell a lot of this is happening between the 1680s all the way up into the late 1700s. I see, okay. And so there's this process of just absorbing these communities in. And this is why we became the largest tribe in the southeast. Nice, the interesting. During this time, of course this begins with the Spanish conquistadors coming up from the south. That's the early 1500s. It's later on that the French

come along. And that will evolve of course into the Louisiana purchase later on in the Americans arriving. I'm just trying to get a handle on how over this period of time, how the Choctaw understood the coming of the white man and how generally they were going to deal with that. So yeah, 1699 in the French first come ashore in the Gulf Coast along Choctaw territory. And then about a year later in 1700, they make a formal alliance with the Choctaw people.

And this is what started our 73-year relationship with the French. And for the most part, it was a good relationship without our food and without our advanced knowledge

on agriculture. The French colonies could never have survived in the Gulf. They relied on us

to teach them how to live on this land. And we did that in an exchange, you know, we got trade goods from the French. However, this was a time of turbulence, you know, the French, or on and off it, or with the British. And the British had agreements with some of our related tribes. Some of the other tribes in the southeast began to raid us for slaves, icing. And so they would kill our men and take our women and children as part of this slave trade. And so Choctaw people

relied on the French because we needed their trade goods. We needed their, you know, metal implements and those sort of things because they made things in our society easier. They made advancements in our society. And so we became fairly close with the French throughout that 63-year period. The rug has to be, I mean, it's pulled out of Rundia because of the Louisiana purchase eventually, right? Because it becomes a complete shift of mission, really. The French are concerned with

primarily the Caribbean and all of that. And suddenly the Americans are coming because this is their land as they now see it. Little do they know? How did the Choctaw deal with the Americans after the Louisiana purchase on into the war of 1812 and so forth? Yeah. So when the French were forced to leave control of Choctaw Country, the British came in. And so Choctaws, you know, had

powers off back and forth. And so by the 1790s, there was someone knew that came into the scene. And that was the Americans. And so Choctaw leaders, you know, we created relationships in alliances. We were large. We were prosperous. And these colonial powers feared our military. And so we would make military alliances with these different European powers. And so what you see is in the late 1790s, you see Choctaw warriors traveling up the Mississippi River to go fight

in the northwest Indian War alongside the United States. You see Choctaw scouts that are volunteering themselves during the revolution. But for the most part, the Choctaw nations stayed out of the

Revolutionary War. They stayed out of, you know, to them, it was just another colonial conflict.

Yep. You know, they had bigger and better things to do. So it wasn't until the war of 1812, the Choctaw nation really got involved. Yeah. It's such an important factor. I mean, let's take a short break. But we'll talk afterwards about when this story, you know, more officially begins with 1830 in the Indian Removal Act. But it was important to spend time on this to understand the subtleties of time, first of all, how many years these nations have been in these lands,

how sophisticated they were, how strong they were, having recovered from a lot of what you're talking about the disease and so forth. They were reorganized and and retrenched. And suddenly comes a new

“kind of threat. And that's what we're talking about.”

We're back discussing the trail of tears with Ryan Spring of the Choctaw nation. Ryan, we've talked about the ancestral lands and the origin stories of this nation. And then the Europeans arriving, the Spanish, the French, the English even. I want to now turn to the United States, which has, you know, become such a player now, you know, in terms of the Louisiana purchase and all that is, that's going on. How are these treaties broken? In the 1790s, we can see from writings

by the United States at that time that the United States was afraid of Choctaws. They said if we do not secure an alliance with the Choctaws and the other South Eastern tribes and they ally with the Spanish, they could wipe out the United States. And so the US created an Indian agent for the Southeast.

To try to broker peace in relationships. So in 1786, we had our first treaty with the United

“States, the Treaty of Hopewell. And this is an important treaty. There's a lot that goes into this”

treaty. I won't go into all of it. But this is the beginning of the relationship between the Choctaw people and the United States. And for a long time, as I said, you know, we helped in the Northwest Indian War and individual warriors may help here and there. But we weren't really involved with the United States as conflicts too much. How were an 1801 and 1802, 1803 and 1805, the United States approached us several times for treaties of land session. And so land sessions are not a

new thing to Choctaw people. The British did it to us in 1765. And so we knew that for whatever reason, these colonial powers wanted land. They wouldn't share it. As Choctaw people would often do, but they wanted in perpetuity, which is completely different concept that Choctaw and other

“indigenous people have. You can't own land. But that's what the United States wanted to do.”

So the first treaty was about trade. And Choctaws are all about establishing trade. That's more items.

That's more power coming in to these chiefs and being able to provide for their people. In 1802, we see it a small part of land so that they can build a fort next to us. But more importantly, next to the fort, they build a trade house, also known as a trade factory. They use this factory to put our people into debt. So President Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Henry Harrison talks about how, if we put these peoples in debt, he's specifically talking about the chiefs, the people

and power. Then we can leverage them to give us land and exchange for the debts. Wow. So this is a practice that's illegal today in the United States. But at that time, it wasn't. Sure. And so the treaty of Hoba can top an 1803 and the Treaty of Mount Dexter in 1805 were both done to settle Choctaw

Ryan, what led to the passing of the Indian removal act of 1830? I mean, that's pretty radical stuff

“in terms of in the context of everything we're talking about, which had been pretty subtle”

event to event kind of things. This is a sweeping new idea, obviously. Yeah, you know, the relationship with the United States, you know, at this time, as we talked about is about a military alliance. So Choctaw's fought with the United States during the War of 1812, during the Pensacola campaign, during the Red Stick War. We helped Andrew Jackson defend the Battle of New Orleans, which is what pushed his political career into becoming President later on, right? But the concept

of assimilation of native peoples started to change. And Choctaw people realize this immediately because our thanks for helping in these conflicts was another session of land. And it was the Treaty of Choctaw Trading House in 1816. And this left a very sour taste in our leaders' mouth.

“So our leaders came up with a new plan. They said, "We can't become military allies."”

You know, the United States has become more powerful at this point. Now that they're not worried

about threats from the East, they're now looking westward. And when you start to see the beginnings of manifest destiny take root. And the first people in the way of that destiny are the Choctaw. That's interesting to me because we're way down in the south west of what is the United States at this point. How is it that the Choctaw are the first versus other more northern tribes in the southward? So, you know, the Creek Nation had been subdued during the War of 1812. And Choctaws

were the largest tribe in the Southeast. And so, but we also had a relationship. Andrew Jackson himself knew these Choctaw leaders. The U.S. Indian agents knew the strengths and weaknesses of the Choctaw people. And so, in 1820, who did they send to force us to sign a treaty? They sent Andrew Jackson himself. And so, the concept of assimilating peoples, well, they're not assimilating fast enough. So, let's move them farther west, so they have time to assimilate. And they can

become a new generation of American people, right? Not sure if they really cared about us assimilating as much as they wanted all of the invaluable natural resources that were in the Choctaw Nation. President Andrew Jackson figures centrally to all of this story. He is able to pass when he becomes president the Indian Removal Act of 1830. And let me just explain this for the audience. This authorized the American government to liquidate any native American title to lands claimed

in the southeast. By the way, there would be no title. I mean, that was not the point that was

the point of their society. It was not a deeded land on their terms. It's amazing that such an

“infection needs any kind of legal justification because that's what they're doing. They're just”

moving on them militarily, eventually. But this must have been quite a challenge for any right-minded legal expert who were trying to figure out, you know, how do we even frame this in a kind of legality? But that was the Indian Removal Act, right? That was the idea of what we need a law. We need something to refer to that exists now, so we'll pass this. I think the Indian Removal Act was the weapon. It was the implement that was used to justify it. But the architecture for the

Indian Removal Act came from federal court cases, which would be later called the Marshall trilogy. I see. And so the Marshall trilogy ruled that this type of thinking is acceptable. And then the Indian Removal Act, which barely, barely, nearly passed Congress, was then passed. And so after the Indian Removal Act, negotiators were sent out to all these different tribes in the

southeast. But there was a particular push for chalktoys to be the first to sign this treaty.

Why is that? Well, in 1830, after the Indian Removal Act was passed, we had chalktoys leaders that were fighting against removal. They were fighting against this thought of removal. But the state of Mississippi started passing laws that made it illegal for chalktoys people to be a chief, and made it illegal for them to practice our form of government. They made it illegal to be a sovereign nation. And they didn't have any control over it, but it put a lot of pressure

on these chiefs. So a lot of the chiefs at this time are involved, not just with the tribe,

seed throughout all of these decades. You know, there's multi-ethnic people living in these

“areas. And chalktoys people have a relationship with these. And we still have to secure these”

trade goods for our communities. So ironically, the favorable relationships or the more developer relationships end up putting them in the crosshairs more quickly and efficiently than any others that ends up backfiring. The whole thing ends up backfiring on them. I mean, the simple fact is that as we've said before, this is all about land, not relationships. We're not building relationships here. We're getting land. The territory of the chalktoys was extremely valuable,

especially to cotton growers, now who had been since the late 70 hundreds equipped with a cotton gin, which had created, you know, much more efficient means of processing cotton, therefore, needing more land to grow more cotton. And they were running into lots of problems with that because they didn't have rotational crop technology or science. And so their lands were becoming infertile and they were needing new ones to the west. Well, where does that come from? That comes from land

“that is settled already. So let's get rid of these people. That's really at the center of this, isn't it?”

It really is. They want our water. They want our fertile lands. And they want these developed areas that chalktoys people have been living in and prove it upon. I mean, if you're going to reset up a community, why clear land and set up something new? It's much easier to take over something that's already existed. Exactly. This leads to the treaty of the Dancing Creek 1831. Can you explain that? So in early part of 1831, chief Greenwood Floor sent an unauthorized treaty to the

federal government stating that, okay, we understand that our people are going to be removed. There's no way against this. So chief LeFloor was trying to get ahead of what was going on. But this is very unpopular. I mean, if anyone found out, he might have been killed. And so he did this in secret. The US government looked at this treaty. They knew that it was not signed by all the chiefs. That didn't matter to them. It was the fact that the chalktoys people got too much out of this

treaty. So they denied it. But it was the fact that a chalktoys chief had sent this treaty in that told them, okay, let's remove this tribe because they're ready. They're ready to sign removal.

“I see. That's what caused this push for the negotiators to come in and start negotiating the”

Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. And we're talking about 11 million acres of land,

which includes Naniwaya Cave, which is the cave of the origin story of the birth of the chalktoys. These are precious lands that are being given up. They are then faced with the choice to either remain in the region and take US citizenship or move west. How is that debate, I imagine? It must be a debate handled by this nation. During the treaty negotiations, it was awful. One of the negotiators left the treaty grounds because the other negotiator was spreading such a greetious

lies. It was an awful experience for people to have to go through. And at the end of the day, they threaten the chalktoys people with, well, we'll just end our relationship with you. We'll end our alliance. And the United States will militarily crush you, put your people into slavery, you will all become words of the state of Mississippi and your tribal cease to exist. So the chiefs were forced to sign this treaty. They didn't want to, but there's a balance between

do we stay free as in people, as God intended us to be, or do we stay in our lands, which were supposed to care for, and which our ancestors are buried in? Yeah. And that our

community has always been here. And that whole discussion is being done with a gun to your head.

The march that we're talking about, I want to remind people that trail of tears, many people misunderstand this, is not just one thing. It's many things. It's at least five major events within which there are stages. And the chalktoys we've explained are the first of those major migrations that are forced upon native nations, but even within that migration, there are different stages. So it begins in 1831 and moves to 1833, this time period that we're talking about,

15,000 chalktoys, of a total population of roughly 20,000. So the majority of the chalktoys nation makes the move, 5,000 stay behind, under what circumstances do they stay? So article 14 of the

Treaty of Dancing Rapid Creek basically stated that, if any chalktoys people wanted to stay and

become citizens of Mississippi, they could. And they had to register within six months after the signing or the ratification of the treaty. That was not followed through. The Indian agent that was

later removed from office, but it was a very comfortable removal of office. So I'm sure that he was being instructed to make sure that no one's allowed to stay. And so it created a lot of chaos and it created a lot of issues. And this article 14 had issues and implications all the way up until the late 1800s. A man named George W. Harkins was a district chief of the chalktoys summarized the views of many his people. In his farewell letter to the American people, there's a famous

excerpt from this if you wouldn't mind reading it. It is with considerable dividends that I attempt to address the American people. We as chalktoys were either choose to suffer and be free, then live under the degrading influence of laws, which our voice could not

“be heard in their formation. Well, where was this published? How did the American people see it?”

Or did they? When Chief Harkins was on his removal in 1831, he was sitting on a steamboat and Vicksburg, Mississippi. And on just some scrap sheets of paper, he started writing a letter. By the time the steamboat had reached Natchez, he had an opportunity to pass off these scribbled notes to occur here with the Natchez newspaper and they were able to publish this document in the Natchez daily. It took a couple years for it to really circulate around the country.

But it is one of my favorite speeches from a chalktoil leader because he just doesn't talk about what's happening, the ethnic cleansing that's happening to chalktoil people. But he looks towards

the future and a positive light. And he states that he hopes that this will never happen again

“to chalktoil people and chalktoil people will be prosperous. And he's looking towards the future”

of future of healing and positivity, which is one of our values that we still focus on today when it comes to the trail of tears. And I want to underscore one phrase there. We as chalktoys rather chose to suffer and be free than live under the degrading influence of laws, which our voice could not be heard in their formation. So it's the autonomy of the nation that is the priority versus staying and assimilating as were Americans' expectations of Native Americans.

Accounts we have from the victims of this trail of tears are relatively scarce. And this is intentional. Many of their children did not wish to pass down the stories of these horrors because of the starting a new trying to guard their children from these stories, right? Absolutely. You know, we know of the history of what happened. We know of some of the accounts, but overall chalktoil people chose to let these stories go to sleep instead of passing on that

trauma. So we have a few examples of some eyewitness accounts, but for the most part, these stories were, as I said, left to sleep. Yeah. Well, we're left talking rather generally about it.

And as I say, there are three stages. The first wave happens November 1831. This is arguably where

people suffered the most. Two groups left Memphis and another left from Vicksburg. The nuts and

“bolts of this kind of migration, I think, are really important to understand. How did it work?”

So the 1831 removal was the first removal that the United States had ever done. And it was just fraught with chaos from day one. So you have thousands of people coming to Vicksburg and you have thousands of people going to Memphis and they'd be taking steamboats. The goal was to have these steamboats take them to a central part in Arkansas, where then they could walk on military roads, which had just been created. However, this decade suffered some of the worst winter weather

that's ever been seen and recorded. That would be my first question. They started in November.

I mean, why would you do that? Well, for talk to people, the winter months were the traditional time period for what we would call the Oachito or the big hunt. And so throughout the year, you have a responsibility to your community. And during the spring, during the summer, and during the fall, you put your community first. And part of that is taking care of the agricultural fields, making sure that the community has crops to feed on. But then after those obligations to your

community are completed, the winter months are the traditional time of year that Choctaw people would move. You know, today, we would say, go on holiday or on vacation. So traditionally, this is

now during the winter, we will have time to set up our crops and get ready for the next year

“coming into Indian territory. It was all structured around moving quickly, getting resettled,”

getting the crops together. And then getting our new society over an Indian territory up and running, as efficiently as possible. Two questions. Did they know where they were going? Had there been scouts, sent a head where their agents said, understood what they were going to set up? Had that's already been set up for them or not? So Choctaw leaders, a lot of the men knew of these lands to the West. And so there's a famous speech by Pushmataha at the Treaty of Doke stand. And he is a warrior

had traveled to Oklahoma and parts of East Texas for hunting during this time of year. Okay. In the 1790s and 1800s and 1810s, a lot of these Choctaw warriors knew this area. And they knew it well. But part of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was that survey parties would be brought

“by the federal government out of these Choctaw leaders to survey the lands. So there was one”

group that was sponsored by the federal government that went out in surveyed lands, areas where they could reestablish communities. And then there was another group of Choctaw leaders that went out on their own to do the same thing. Okay. And so again, you know, we're we're not a passive people. We're very active people. We know that we're going to suffer removal. We know that we're going to be removed. So let's do everything we can to help establish these communities. We even had a group of Choctaw

people in 1830, remove out early to try to establish corn fields and get food ready for the first wave

of removal. But as you say, winter is particularly bad this year, 1831. And as a result, wagons get stuck in those conditions. Their disease, cholera, dysentery runs rampant. Obviously, most of the victims

“are going to be the elders and the young as always. The description of this trail is one of”

tears and death, which is attributed to a Choctaw named Mikko, a chief after this removal. So this does not go well at all. Do the Choctaw and the U.S. government learn their lessons in the following migrations? No, absolutely not. I mean, the 1831 removal was fraught with negligence. Yeah. So the Indian agent and the East, Indian agent and the West are not communicating and that negligence led to the death of Choctaw people. Supplies, food, equipment, everything is in a wrong place.

Things are not scheduled on time. And that with the weather, you know, and some cases the weather's hitting zero degrees Fahrenheit. We are hitting inches of ice and snow and people are left in the elements to die. Yeah. And so the 1831 removal was so expensive and it had so many issues that the U.S. government said if we continue removing the tribes of the southeast, the United States will go broke if we continue in this fashion. So in 1832, they took the responsibility of removal

away from the Indian agents and they gave it to the Department of War. And the Department of War is who would remove all other tribes in U.S. history. Right. The military takes over. The U.S. only takes over. They were efficient at the cost of our lives. They were very efficient at moving people quickly and without remorse. Right. And so in 1832, we see a cholera epidemic hit the United

States for the first time. And so it comes up through New Orleans. It hits Vicksburg. It hits Memphis

and it continues to St. Louis and Choctaw people are right in the middle of this epidemic. So now they're loaded into cramped spaces and camps on steamboats and they're contracting cholera and they're dying. Yeah. Well, when those three waves are achieved by 1833, 15,000 Choctaw have left. That removal becomes the desired model for the removal other tribes from other areas. In later years to come, the Cherokee, the Muscogee, Seminal, Chickasaw tribes were also removed as well.

That's that becomes as in total the idea of the trail of tears. But as I said, broken up into many of them. Let's take another break. Ryan will come back and discuss the aftermath of the trail of tears for the Choctaw specifically and it's lasting legacy. We're back with Ryan Spring of the Choctaw nation talking about the trail of tears. Ryan after three waves, the bulk of the Choctaw were displaced, relocated to modern day, Oklahoma.

came and and how was that arrival and resettlement organized? You know, the first thing they came to

“is that they were promised through the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek supplies and everything”

that was needed to reset up our communities. However, because of the horrible winters that were happening, there was a lot of rainfall and floods were killing crops in Oklahoma. So the first two years 1831 and 1832 were miserable for Choctaw people and there was a lot of starvation after coming off the trail. Government rations were not supplied as they were supposed to be because the government was trying to save money from all the funds they had spent on the removal.

And so there's one instance where there's a removal party that gets off the trail and they are given spoiled pork. And so those people starving ate that spoiled meat and they died from it. And then you have disease that's also going through the communities. You still have

“cholera and then as people are trying to get reestablished our brother tribe, the Chickasaw come in”

later on and they bring a smallpox epidemic with them that hits our community. And so, despite all this though, Choctaw people persevered. And by 1834 we had met, we had restarted our

government, established our second constitution and just 10 years later by the 1840s we were sending

kids to college again on the east coast. Was the government structure similar to that which was in the native lands? There was a lot of changes in Choctaw country. So in 1826 the Choctaw nation established its first constitution, while we were still in Mississippi. But the 1834 constitution was different and it was different because our people were different now. They're experiences, both negative and positive reshaped our people. And so we drew upon a lot of aspects from our original constitution

“which came from traditional law that our communities had already. And we reshaped that into”

something that would help propel us into the future. And that new form of governance that we had was very successful. By the 1850s, the Choctaw nation had completely rebounded from the trileteers where the strongest economic power in Indian territory. We had the largest school system west of the Mississippi River and the most progressive school system in all of the United States.

Really, that's amazing. What about those who had stayed behind? I just want to close a chapter on

that decision. There were four to six thousand Choctaw who had remained there facing incredible hardship. It must have been incredibly awkward as they shifted into a whole different kind of assimilated life, right? Yeah, absolutely. You know, as you stated, we had 15,000 Choctaws removed in those first three years and about 25 to 30% of them died on the first wave of removal. So about 12,000 people made it. So you have this other remaining contingent in Mississippi in Alabama.

We have Choctaw people still in Louisiana and Arkansas too. And so throughout the 1840s and 1850s, there were additional removals. Another 7,000 Choctaw were removed. And so, you know, there's more generations that are happening. But these people that were in our homeland still, they weren't allowed to stay. You know, they were burned out of their communities. They were pushed to the fringes of where American settlers wouldn't live. And so life in the homeland became very difficult.

We weren't even second-class citizens. We weren't even classified as human beings. And so Choctaw people suffered. And which is what caused many to continue removing in the 1840s and 1850s. I see. Is there a significant Choctaw population in that same area now or not? There is. Today, they were organized in the 1830s. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians still exists. They come from about 12 to 1500 Choctaw people that were still there in the 1900s.

And they're a tribe of 12,000 people today. Do they have their own land now? Was that ever negotiated? Yeah. So, during the Indian Reorganization Act in the 1930s, they were able to re-establish their own government. And they were able to re-establish their own lands. So, the Mississippi Band has several reservations in Mississippi. And, you know, they are, the Choctaw's just as we are. Gotcha. And, you know, we still interact with them today because we're all one

people, right? The casualties for those later removals of Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminal, Chickasaw Tribes, it's estimated that 60,000 people crossed these trails of tiers of which 10 to 15,000

that are even in the 20th century. This is a constant movement that's happening of this population.

“So, in 1902 and 1903, there were another wave of removals that were done by train. So, over 2000”

Choctaw people were taken from Mississippi in Louisiana, brought by train and taken to Indian territory to get ready for allotment. How is the trail of tiers now remembered and commemorated by the Choctaw people? So, since the 1990s, the Choctaw Nation has done an annual memorial trail of tiers walk. And, this is a way that we just, we're not just remembering those that didn't make the journey, but we're remembering those that did survive. And, then that helped build the legacy that the

Choctaw Nation now has today. You know, we have over 235,000 tribal members today and we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for these leaders and all of these Choctaw people that persevered through this dark time. Yes. And so, from that, we've had families and communities that have done their own

“celebrations and their own honourings of the trail of tiers. With COVID, you know, we had another”

impact in our community. And so, we started doing a virtual trail of tiers walk. And so, you know, the majority of our people don't live within our reservation. And that's because additional removals done by the U.S. government during the Indian urban relocation program removed the majority of Choctaw families and the 1960s and 70s out of our reservation to all these big cities around the U.S. And so, these later removals disconnected a lot of our people. So, the virtual

trail of tiers walk is a way that we can engage with our people that don't necessarily live here, but are still a part of our greater community. We also have our trail of tiers bike riders,

which is an amazing group of people that, you know, over a week journey, ride segments of the

“trail of tiers from Mississippi all the way to Oklahoma and to help commemorate that history. It's”

an incredible story of survival, really, not just of people and lives, but also of a culture. When you consider the odds against the society, amazing story and shared with other groups that had to do the same sort of relocation, where did the concept of the memorial walk, the memorial trail to yours come from? In 1990, we had citizens from the Republic of Ireland visit the Choctaw Nation and they re-awaken to story about the Choctaw Irish gift exchange. So, in 1847, there were two

gifts of donations from the Choctaw people, given to the people of Ireland during the famine.

One gift at Skullival was for a little over $170, and the second gift down at Doke'sville

was a little over $150. So, we had forgotten about this history, we had forgotten about these gifts, and so, in the 90s, this knowledge is re-awakened by visitors from Ireland that came to talk with us about this. Choctaw people were excited about re-learning this history, re-awakening this history, and so, a delegation of our leaders went to the Republic of Ireland in 1991, and they participated in Archbishop Desmond Tutu's famine walk that he was hosting. As part of the memorial long

of his. I want to ask you a question. When I struggle with and I imagine a lot of listeners share this confusion. The United States, we talk about it a lot. As a nation, roots itself in the ideals of fairness and justice. Yet, when you look at this history of removal, the trail of tears, how do you, as a member of this nation, make any sense of the contradiction between that national self-image and the historical reality? Where do you guys come down with this

and process this? That is a difficult question. I will say that, you know, on an individual level, that's something that every Choctaw person has to come to terms with. You know, we are a bicultural people. We're not just Choctaws, we're also modern Americans. And so, it's something that I've struggled with, you know, growing up doing the pledge of allegiance every day in class, attending events and doing the pledge of allegiance. You know, where does all that fit in? And, you know,

I have my grandfather and my father, both fought for the U.S. armed forces. And so, we have a legacy of Choctaw people that have fought and died for the United States. And so, at the end of the day, we have to continue moving forward and we have to continue being positive. This is something that

from that. And we have to continue forward. We have to learn our history so that it doesn't happen

“again to us. But we have to do that in a positive way that we continue to rebuild our communities.”

You know, as Choctaw people, we are the indigenous people of the United States. We are elders here.

And we have so much that our culture and our history can share with modern-day American people.

“We have ways of improving American culture and American life. And we're just waiting for those”

opportunities to be able to make this such a beautiful place to live again. Interesting. Wise words. Thank you so much. Ryan Spring is a cultural research associate at the

“historic preservation department of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. How do listeners know more about”

the Choctaw Nation? Is there a website they should go to? Absolutely. You can go to ChoctawNation.com. There you can find information on the Choctaw Nation today. And then you can find further information on the Choctaw Trail of Tears by looking at the Biscanx section, which is our travel newspaper. Thank you so much, Ryan. Nice to meet you. Thank you, Dawn. Hey, thanks for listening to American history it. You know, every week we release new episodes,

too, new episodes, dropping Mondays and Thursdays on kinds of content from mysterious

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