The Trail of Tears: The Forced Removal of the Cherokee Nation

In the spring of 1829 a stranger crouched in a creek in the Georgia piedmont, sifting gravel through his fingers with a tin pan and a rifle beside him, and said quietly that there was color in this branch. By autumn thousands of miners had followed him onto Cherokee land. They dug shafts and sluices without asking anyone, cut timber, turned their hogs loose in Cherokee cornfields, and took it for granted that the land would soon change hands anyway.

What they walked past was a republic. From its capital at New Echota the Cherokee Nation governed itself under a written constitution of 1827, with a principal chief, a two-house National Council and courts in eight districts. It printed the Cherokee Phoenix in English and in Sequoyah's syllabary. Its people ran mills, ferries, orchards and schools, and some of its families held enslaved African Americans.

The book moves from the gold fields to the treaty signed at New Echota in 1835 by a faction with no authority to sign it, over the protests of Principal Chief John Ross; to the stockades of the summer of 1838; and to the long road west through the winter that followed, when thousands died. It stays with what the soldiers wrote home, the women who held families together, and the old feuds and new wars that followed the Cherokee into Indian Territory.

They had built exactly the kind of nation Washington claimed it wanted from them. In the end, the gold and the land counted for more.