By the spring of 1838, the two-year window granted under the disputed Treaty of New Echota had expired, and only a small fraction of the Cherokee Nation had voluntarily left their homelands in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. President Martin Van Buren ordered the treaty enforced, and General Winfield Scott arrived in Charleston, Tennessee, on May 8, 1838, to command roughly 7,000 federal troops and state militiamen tasked with removing an estimated 15,500 Cherokees, along with about 1,500 enslaved African Americans held within the Nation, to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi.

​

The Roundup and the Stockades

​

The forced roundup began on May 26, 1838, and in Georgia was largely complete within three weeks. Soldiers descended on farms and cabins with little warning, marching families away from meals, fields, and livestock they would never see again. To hold them, the Army had built a network of 31 removal forts and stockades — 13 in Georgia, 8 in Tennessee, 5 in North Carolina, and 5 in Alabama — typically hasty log enclosures of a few acres beside existing Cherokee towns.

​

These posts were meant only for short-term holding. Captives were quickly funneled inward to 11 larger internment camps — 10 in Tennessee and one in Alabama — clustered around Fort Cass at the Cherokee Agency in Charleston, Tennessee, and Fort Payne in Alabama. Fort Cass became the operational headquarters of the removal and the largest concentration of Cherokee prisoners.

 

Conditions in the camps were brutal. Confined through the hot summer of 1838 with inadequate food, contaminated water, and no sanitation, the internees suffered epidemic dysentery, measles, whooping cough, and fever. Hundreds died before a single detachment set out — one estimate places at least 353 deaths from disease in the stockades alone during that summer.

​

The Removal West

​

The first three detachments, forced west by the Army in June 1838 by rail, flatboat, and steamboat along the Tennessee–Ohio–Mississippi–Arkansas water route, met with disaster: low summer rivers, drought, and disease killed three to five people a day on the Arkansas overland stretch. Principal Chief John Ross successfully petitioned Scott to let the Cherokee manage their own removal in cooler weather, and the remaining people were organized into detachments of roughly 700–1,600, each led by a Cherokee conductor and assistant.

​

Beginning in late August 1838 and continuing into November, thirteen Ross-led detachments departed from the Rattlesnake Springs and Fort Cass assembly area, most following the Northern Route across central Tennessee, southwestern Kentucky, southern Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and northwestern Arkansas into Indian Territory. The John Benge detachment of about 1,090 people followed a southern route out of Fort Payne, Alabama, and the John Bell detachment traveled from the Cherokee Agency through Memphis.

​

The 800-mile trek took between 125 and 188 days. Winter overtook the caravans in Illinois, where detachments waited weeks to cross the ice-choked Mississippi, and death became a daily occurrence from exposure, pneumonia, and exhaustion. Missionary physician Elizur Butler, traveling with the Cherokee, estimated that more than 4,000 — roughly one-fifth of the Nation — perished in the stockades and on the trail.

​

Arrival and Disbursement in Indian Territory

​

The Benge detachment ended its march near present-day Stilwell, Oklahoma, on January 17, 1839; the Bell detachment disbanded on January 7; and by late March 1839 all surviving detachments had reached Indian Territory. Detachments dispersed at one of seven disbandment depots, the busiest of them near present-day Spavinaw, Westville, and Stilwell, in the northeastern corner of what is now Oklahoma.

​

Under the Treaty of New Echota, arriving Cherokees were entitled to one year of subsistence rations, distributed at five issuance depots inside the new Cherokee Nation. Families scattered along the Illinois, Grand, and Arkansas river valleys, joining the earlier "Old Settler" Cherokee who had emigrated before 1835. The reunion was tense: political fractures between the Treaty Party, the Ross Party, and the Old Settlers would erupt into assassinations and internal conflict within months — the bitter political aftermath of a removal that had already cost the Cherokee people nearly a quarter of their population.

​

​

READ THE STORY FROM ELLA WATERS' POINT OF VIEW: