Brief Summary Of The Trail Of Tears

Before The Trail of Tears was even a thought we first experience assimilation with Moravian missionaries being allowed on the Cherokee’s land. This tribe was very much settled, they had a newspaper, a form of slavery and even had gone as far as to adopt a government based mostly around that of the United States. In 1802 Georgia ceded their claim of the land west of the Appalachian Mountains to the federal government, in return Georgia wanted Cherokees out. Pleads were being made by tribes to stay in their original homeland from 1830-1838. The Supreme Court ruled in their favor but the then acting President Martin Van Buren told the state of Georgia to ignore it. The Indian Removal Act authorized the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. The Trail of
Wilson was a field worker who told the story of a half white half Cherokee named Mary Cobb Agnew and her unique perspective of The Trail of Tears. Mary Cobb Agnew married Walter S. Agnew before the civil war. Both of Mary Cobb’s parents died when she was just seven years old. Her aunt raised her. Mary Cobb first hears about The Trail of Tears from her mother’s parents whom actually come from the Trail of Tears. She speaks on all of the illness and death her grandparents witnessed while being forced out of their land. Such things happened like dysentery broke out, people were killed while crossing the Mississippi, and many others died from the travel alone. For the ones who had already reached Evansville, Arkansas they received the name “Western Cherokees”. L.W. Wilson says that Mary Cobb and her family stayed in Georgia longer even though she was not sure why. Eventually they went west to join kin that were already settled. Our journey started by wagon from Georgia to Memphis, Tennessee. From there we took a steamboat to Fort Gibson. They eventually found kin in the Flint district; the Flint district is where Marry Cobb grew