A journey on the "Trail of Tears" - and the proud, tragic Cherokees

By Tina Eck Aug 2, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Vonore, Tennessee, US - Indians are dancing on a meadow in the rain-draped valley of the Tennessee River. Rhythmic war cries ring out.

The men are wearing leather footwear called moccasins and have feathers in their jet-black hair. The faces are painted in many colours, their expressions are grim. They are dancing the bear dance - accompanied by the music of flutes and drums - bent over as they glide around each other in powerful impressive movements.

And all this in America's deep south, often better known for its country music, gospel, and Elvis Presley.

But in the 'Sequoyah Birthplace Museum' near the town of Vonore of the Cherokee National Forest, the Cherokee nation of Tennessee is commemorating its past. This speck of land was once their tribal homeland. Today they are dancing in their traditional hunting garb, the kind they wore when moving through the Smoky Mountains more than 175 years ago.

'Normally we don't wear Indian costumes,' says Sony Ledford, a giant of a man. Wearing jeans and a leather jacket, he drove here on his motorcycle. Ledford is a car mechanic and lives in a small farmhouse. But when the Big Island Festival comes around, he and the other tribe members will put on the traditional costume of their ancestors.

Going back 8,000 years, migrants from Asia settled in what today are the south-eastern US states of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. They were the ancestors of the later tribes who went by such names as Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws and Chicasaws.

Then came the Europeans - Spanish and French explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries - bringing such diseases as measles and chicken pox which quickly decimated the so-called Indians. Then, when English settlers started, around the year 1800, to move inwards from the Atlantic coastal regions, the tribes were driven out, further westward.

Moccasin Bend in the city of Chattanooga, at the time a hub and the largest commercial centre of the American south, was the place where the Cherokees decided they did not wish to be shoved any further westward from. And so Chattanooga became the starting point of what became known as the 'Trail of Tears.'

In what today might be called 'ethnic cleansing,' US President Andrew Jackson ruthlessly carried out the Indian Removal Act. That law passed in 1836 called for the forced re-settlement of the Indian tribes of Tennessee and Georgia to the thinly-populated region of Oklahoma, hundreds of miles to the west, beyond the Mississippi River. The majority of the Cherokees voted to reject the law, which had set a deadline of 1838 for them to leave their ancestral lands.

What followed was US army soldiers forcing the Cherokees into camps, often tearing families apart, and then, at the point of a gun, driving them onto often-overloaded boats at such places as Chattanooga, Charleston and Blythe's Ferry, for part of the journey by water.

Scrawny horses pulled the Cherokees' covered wagons. Many people, above all women and children, died along the rough trail during the trek lasting three and a half months. There were two land routes, a northern and southern one, as well as a water route for what would become a 900-mile trek, in the dead of winter, heading westward to Oklahoma. All three were equally brutal. A quarter of the Cherokees did not survive, according to today's history books.

The Cherokee name for the tragic event was 'Nunna daul Isunyi' - the 'trail on which we cried.'

Daryl Black is standing on the banks of the Tennessee River in Chattanooga and is explaining the monument which recalls the Cherokees' tortuous journey. The monument consists of water cascading over steps, running directly from the city centre into the river, at the spot of what was once Ross's Landing. Seven large ceramic seals are implanted in a wall, symbols of the various tribes who were forced onto the boats here.

Many communities in Tennessee have in the meantime collected money to set up similar memorial sites, such as the Cherokee Removal Museum in Blythe's Ferry. It is here that a woman named Shirley Hoskins plays an important part.

'I always knew that I had Cherokee blood in me,' Shirley says, tears streaming from eyes. 'But I didn't know about the deportation.'

The 75-year-old Hoskins was born in Oklahoma. It was only after she had moved to Tennessee that she learned about the tragic fate of her ancestors. Since then, she has worked to try to get a museum built on a lake near Dayton.

Inside the log cabin of the Cherokee Removal Museum there are Indian pottery works, arrowheads and kitchen utensils on display in glass showcases. Outside, a 'Trail of Tears' is replicated in a walk-through stone garden and giant map made of marble. A hiking trail leads to a spectacular lookout point, while another trail leads to the boat landing at Blythe's Ferry, the point from which the Cherokees were deported.

The journey through the Cherokees' past leads on to Red Clay State Park near Collegedale. An eternal flame burns there to commemorate the trek. 'The Cherokees took the fire, which here at their gathering place always was burning, along with them on the journey,' park ranger Erin Medley says. They carried the burning coals in an iron pot, all the way to Oklahoma.